More and more users are spontaneously deleting content they had posted on social media, which impacts the data resources and sustainability of social media. This study aims to clarify the influencing factors of social media users’ information deletion behavior, explore the formation mechanism of this behavior, and make suggestions for avoiding its negative effects. In this study, semi-structured interviews were used to obtain raw data materials, which were coded and analyzed based on the qualitative research paradigm of grounded theory, and a theoretical model of influencing factors of social media users’ information deletion behavior was constructed by drawing on the theory of context collapse. Through three-level coding of interview materials, 6 main categories under 3 dimensions are finally obtained, which are social dimension (perceived context collapse, online social anxiety, role conflict), user dimension (information organization habit, subjective information value), and platform dimension (perceived ease of use). The findings also indicate that perceived context collapse can cause information deletion behavior by aggravating online social anxiety and role conflict. The theoretical contributions and practical implications of this study are also discussed.