News Withholding
A 2025 study published in Social Media + Society found that users of Korea’s most active online chatrooms sometimes deliberately choose not to share news items for apparent self-preservation reasons.
These users share a lot of new stories, but intentionally don’t share some types of news, and the researchers wanted to know why.
Through surveys conducted on more than 400 users of these chat rooms, they found that there are three key reasons why users make the decision not to share some news items, including the desire to please their audience, the desire to protect their privacy, and the desire to shape their online identity.
