When do I Protect Myself? Avoidance Motivation toward Online Sexual Harassment on Social Media: A Study Based on Threat Avoidance Theory

With the increasing use of social media, the occurrence of cyber crimes on social media has also increased. In this paper, we focus on online sexual harassment among various cyber crimes and discuss how social media users use social media to avoid online sexual harassment. Drawing on threat avoidance theory, the factors affecting avoidance motivation were identified. Avoidance motivation was measured based on the affordance of social media, and the influence of the degree of sexualization was tested to examine how environmental factors affect motivation behavior. The results indicated that the more users perceived sexualization on social media, the lower their motivation to avoid sexual harassment. Thus, it is important to create an atmosphere on social media where crime is minimized, and users are able to respond appropriately by continuously managing their accounts on these platforms.