Psychological empowerment on social media: Who are the empowered users?

• This paper focuses on the social media empowerment process at the individual level.
• Intrapersonal empowerment and interactional empowerment were tested.
• Active social media use was positively related to intrapersonal and interactional empowerment.
• A weak association was found between passive social use and interactional empowerment.

This paper introduces the psychological empowerment framework from community psychology to the social media context. Intrapersonal empowerment and interactional empowerment are tested as two focal components of the empowerment process at the individual level. This paper aims to assess the connections between active and passive social media use and psychological empowerment. An online survey was conducted through an online panel (MTurk) with 371 effective responses. Results showed that active use was positively related to both intrapersonal and interactional empowerment, while only a weak association was found between passive use and interactional empowerment.