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Nowadays, online information sharing has become so convenient that has never been before. Today, social media platforms are turned into interesting multicultural phenomena for sharing information throughout the world. In recent years, the popularity of social media platforms have reached to new heights, as the monthly active users of Facebook surpassed 2.45 billion users having multicultural backgrounds as of 3rd quarter, 2019 (Facebook, 2019). Almost more than half of the world’s population is using social media platforms to receive, share and re-share information (Tan & Lee, 2019). In this globalized world, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, etc. provide a favorable environment where information can be shared smoothly and frequently among multicultural individuals, despite their geographical and cultural differences (Boamah, 2018). Longley (2019), defined “multicultural individuals are the members of a society where people with different nationalities, languages, religions and ethnicities living together. People with different cultures have different traditions, lifestyles or imagine of values and ethics (p. 3)”. Information sharing via social media platforms can broadly be categorized into four – sensitive, sensational, political and causal, having two dimensions: dynamic and static (Lewis, 2010; Boamah, 2018). In addition, the social media platforms such as WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook, and MySpace deal with the daily usage, sharing and exchange of information to meet the socio-emotional desires of the multicultural users (Shang et al., 2017).
The decision to share information via a medium is psychologically associated with a combination of motivational factors and network factors (Liu et al., 2016). Therefore, individuals cannot deny the perceived benefits (motivational factors) as they can anticipate and expect to acquire while participating in a virtual setup (Zhang et al., 2017). These benefits and values ultimately influence users’ satisfaction which can affect users’ loyalty towards a social medium and their sharing behavior (Lien et al., 2017).
The information sharing behavior via social media varies from culture to culture, people to people and also society to society (Boamah, 2018). There is substantial literature examining information sharing behavior of monocultural individuals; however the literature about multicultural individuals’ information sharing behavior via social media platforms is still sparse. A few studies have investigated the antecedents of Facebook use in a specific culture and environment (Zhang et al., 2019). There are two studies primarily focused on Chinese and Italian cultures that examined the factors affecting users’ intention to share and seek health information on a medium by using net valence model (Li et al., 2018). Another cross cultural research has been conducted to do a comparative analysis of Instagram usage in Croatian and the U.S. culture – evaluated the relation between motives and outcome behavior (Sheldon et al., 2017). Their findings revealed that gratifications of a specific society, nation or masses determine the patterns of social medium (Instagram) usage and further they speculated that user’s culture also plays a moderating role.