Abstract: To explore the influencing factors and mechanism of social media users’ information avoidance behavior in public health emergency, is great for providing reference path for better meeting users’ information needs and optimizing social media information environment. Taking the epidemic situation of COVID-19 as an example, college students with rich experience in using social media were selected as the research samples, and the data were obtained through in-depth interviews. Using the qualitative research method of grounded theory, this paper extracts concepts and categories, and constructs the influencing factors model of social media users’ information avoidance behavior under public health emergencies. In public health emergency, information overload and environmental factors indirectly affect social media users’ information avoidance behavior by stimulating users’ emotion, cognitive structure and risk perception; cognitive structure and risk perception directly affect social media users’ information avoidance behavior, and also stimulate users’ emotion; high wake-up emotion and low wake-up emotion in emotional factors can lead to different types of information avoidance behavior of social media users. Strong-ties social media and weak-ties social media have moderating effect in the impact of information overload on users’ emotion, cognitive structure and risk perception.

Key words: Social media, Information avoidance, Public health emergency, Grounded theory, User behavior