Filtering Out vs. Looking Away? Proactive and Reactive Online Information Avoidance in the Face of Health Misinformation

Online information avoidance (OIA) has become a prominent issue, yet scholarship often treats it as a monolithic construct, overlooking the distinction between proactive (e.g., blocking) and reactive (e.g., scrolling past) behaviors. This study examined the causal impact of misinformation exposure on these two distinct avoidance strategies and investigated the moderating role of information-verifying efficacy (IVE). Through an online experiment (N = 310) utilizing a (misinformation exposure: misinformative vs. factual) between-subjects design, we found that IVE served as a critical buffer. Crucially, the interaction between misinformation exposure and IVE was significant only for proactive OIA: high-IVE individuals showed reduced proactive avoidance when exposed to misinformation, whereas this buffering effect was absent for reactive OIA. Moreover, message credibility was identified as a key mediator in this dynamic. These findings suggest the importance of distinguishing avoidance types and highlight that IVE empowers users to curate, rather than disconnect from, their information environments.