Online media and news consumption during the global COVID-19 pandemic, does it ever get too much? A quantitative study on online media and news consumption behaviours, and their impact on the experience of social media fatigue amongst young adults in the Netherlands.

For the past 1,5 years, the world has been experiencing a global pandemic because of the spread of the COVID-19 virus. As a result, many countries including the Netherlands have been on strict lockdowns, limiting our physical social contact, and subsequently, increasing online alternatives. Online media have been recognized as powerful means for the dissemination and consumption of pandemic-related news information. However, spending too much time online can also cause people to feel overwhelmed by the limitless amounts of online content that is available. The spread of the COVID-19 virus caused a lot of changes in our online behaviour, especially that of young adults, which makes it important for us to record, realize and understand. Therefore, this research aims to explore the online media consumption behaviours of young adults living in the Netherlands during a global pandemic and how these differ between those with different demographic characteristics such as age, gender, and education. Doing so, this research focuses on identifying the online behaviour and online news consumption patterns of young adults, and their experience with the phenomenon of social media fatigue. Adopting a quantitative research approach, this research gathered data using an online survey, which was distributed through several social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp. This resulted in a non-random sample of 191 young adults living in the Netherlands. Using various statistical tests such as a factor analysis, Chi-square test and regression analysis, this research succeeded to identify the current online behaviours of young adults, and how they experience(d) social media fatigue during the times of the pandemic. The most significant finding is that age and education correlated positively with level of diversity and activity of news consumption, indicating that those who are older and higher educated consume news from a larger variety of sources, as well as interact with news information more actively. Additionally, it was found that young adults in the Netherlands are generally classified as active news consumers who prefer to consume their news using online channels such as Instagram as opposed to traditional media. Furthermore, the results showed that although the average time spent online has increased significantly, this has had no effect on the feeling of social media fatigue amongst young adults and that surprisingly only few claimed to feel overwhelmed by online content. However, those who are considered more active or interactive news consumers are also more likely to experience social media fatigue than those who consume news more passively.