The study, conducted by Zhang Hao Goh of the Centre for Information Integrity and the Internet at Nanyang Technological University’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, and Gulizar Haciyakupoglu of the university’s Centre of Excellence for National Security, set out to test whether experiences of online harms moderate the relationship between internet use and informational gratification. Their starting point was a conceptual gap. Uses and gratifications theory, articulated most influentially by Elihu Katz and colleagues in the 1970s, holds that individuals’ social conditions shape how they use media to satisfy needs, and that this use is typically active, adaptive, and conscious. What the framework did not anticipate is a contemporary internet saturated with harms: harassment, scams, misinformation, privacy violations, and the growing catalogue of abuses that researchers now document across platforms.

The authors argue that exposure to such harms may push users into compensatory use, a mode of engagement driven less by curiosity or information-seeking than by a need to escape or offset distress. Compensatory use, in turn, is closely associated with problematic internet use, a pattern of engagement that can undermine the very benefits users hope to derive from being online. In other words, the same hours spent browsing can represent two very different psychological phenomena depending on what the user has endured along the way.

To capture this heterogeneity, the researchers turned to latent profile analysis, a statistical technique that sorts survey respondents into unobserved subgroups based on patterns in their answers. Rather than treating online harm exposure as a simple continuum, the method allowed the team to identify distinct user profiles defined by how frequently respondents encountered online harms. Three profiles emerged from the data: a group with high frequencies of experiencing online harms, a group with average frequencies, and a group with low frequencies. This person-centered approach acknowledges a reality that variable-centered statistics often flatten: the internet experience of a user who is constantly targeted looks qualitatively different from that of one who rarely is, even if their total screen time is identical.

With the three profiles established, the researchers applied multi-group structural equation modeling to examine whether the pathway from social conditions to gratification through internet use operated differently across the groups. The model they tested was a classic uses and gratifications mediation chain: social conditions influence how people use the internet, and that use, in turn, shapes the gratifications they obtain, particularly informational gratification, the sense of being informed and having one’s informational needs met.

The results were strikingly asymmetric. For the average-exposure group, the mediation held exactly as the traditional theory predicts. Internet usage significantly mediated the influence of users’ social conditions on their gratifications, reflecting what the authors describe as moderate, needs-driven use that aligns with the core uses and gratifications framework. For these users, the internet behaves as the theory always assumed it would: a tool that active individuals bend to their purposes, converting their social circumstances into satisfying informational outcomes.

For the high-exposure group, however, the story fell apart. The indirect effect from social conditions through internet use to gratification was statistically insignificant, even though the direct impact of internet use on gratification was the most pronounced of any of the three profiles. That combination is the study’s most intriguing finding. Highly harmed users still derive gratification from their internet use, arguably more intensely than anyone else, but that gratification no longer follows the orderly path the theory describes. The authors interpret this as evidence that under highly adverse online conditions, internet use may become highly needs-driven and compensatory rather than adaptive, active, and conscious. The user is not choosing the internet to meet a need; the user is being driven to it, and the reward that follows is entangled with the distress that preceded it.

This distinction matters because compensatory and adaptive use are not merely different flavors of the same behavior. Research on problematic internet use has repeatedly linked compensatory engagement with poorer well-being outcomes, including loneliness and diminished quality of life. A meta-analytic review of gratification and problematic internet use published in Addictive Behaviors in 2024 underscored the association between gratification-seeking patterns and problematic engagement, and recent work in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions found that problematic users report heightened experiences of both gratification and compensation simultaneously. The Singapore study adds a crucial structural insight to this literature: the very mechanism that makes internet use rewarding for most users may be absent precisely among those who use it most compulsively.

The findings also carry implications for how scholars and policymakers think about digital safety. Online harms have typically been studied as a discrete problem, the domain of cybersecurity researchers, platform trust-and-safety teams, and anti-cyberbullying campaigns. This study suggests that harm exposure is not an add-on to media psychology but a moderator of it, capable of rewiring the fundamental relationship between use and reward. Survey research from the United Kingdom’s Victims’ Commissioner on the impact of online abuse, and work by Stevens and colleagues documenting gender differences in experiences of online harms, have already shown that victimization shapes how comfortable people feel participating online. The new study extends that logic from participation to gratification itself, implying that a user who is chronically harmed may be psychologically cut off from the benefits that justify their time online, even as their usage intensifies.

There are, of course, limits to what a single survey-based study can establish. The design is cross-sectional, so the direction of causality between harm exposure, use, and gratification cannot be definitively pinned down; it is plausible that people who already use the internet heavily for compensatory reasons also place themselves in harm’s way more often. The profiles were derived from self-reported frequencies of harm experiences, which are subject to recall and interpretation biases. And the mediation held only for the average-exposure group, leaving open questions about users at the extremes of both distributions. The authors note that the data supporting the findings are available from the first author upon reasonable request, and the research was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Nanyang Technological University under reference IRB-2023-317.

Even with those caveats, the study lands at a consequential moment. As AI-powered platforms personalize feeds and conversational agents mediate more of the information environment, the uses and gratifications tradition is being asked to explain behaviors its originators never imagined. The theory has proven adaptable before, absorbing considerations of habit, social cognition, and algorithmic curation. What this study proposes is perhaps its most demanding update yet: that any account of why people use the internet, and what they get from it, must reckon with what the internet does to them. For the majority of users who experience harms at moderate rates, the internet remains what the theory promised, a responsive instrument of need satisfaction. For those who live with frequent online harms, the instrument may be playing a different tune entirely, one driven by compensation rather than choice, and one that the next generation of media theory will need to name, measure, and address.

Subject of Research: How experiences of online harms moderate the relationship between internet use and informational gratification within uses and gratifications theory

Article Title: Do experiences of online harms moderate the relationship between Internet use and informational gratification? insights from the Uses and Gratifications perspective

Article References: Goh, Z. H., & Haciyakupoglu, G. (2026). Do experiences of online harms moderate the relationship between Internet use and informational gratification? insights from the Uses and Gratifications perspective. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1568. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10043-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10043-6

Keywords: uses and gratifications theory, online harms, internet use, informational gratification, latent profile analysis, structural equation modeling, problematic internet use, compensatory internet use, cyberpsychology, media psychology, digital safety, survey research