Social media microblogs are extensively used to get news and other information. It brings the real challenge to distinguish that what particular information is credible. Especially when user ...authenticity is hidden, due to the microblog's anonymity feature. Low credibility content creates an imbalance in society. Therefore many research studies are conducted to assess automatic microblog's credibility but the majority of them offer different concepts of credibility and the problem seems unresolved. Credibility is multi-disciplinary, hence there is no generalized or accepted credibility concept with all its necessary and detailed constructs/components. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the complete anatomy of information credibility from different disciplines. It is accomplished here through an in-depth and organized study of all the problem dimensions for the identification of comprehensive and necessary credibility constructs. The framework is also proposed based on the identified constructs. It adheres to these constructs and presents their inter-relationships. It is believed that the framework would provide the necessary building blocks for implementing an effective automatic credibility assessment system. The framework is generic to social media and specifically implemented for microblogs. It is completely transformed up to features level, in the context of microblogs. Regarding automatic credibility assessment, it is proposed after detailed analysis that the attempt should be made for hybrid models combining feature-based and graph-based approaches. It is observed that quite a few surveys in the literature focus on some limited aspects of microblogs credibility but no literature survey and fundamental study exists that consolidates the work done. To understand the broader domain of credibility and consolidate the work in this area that can lead us to a suitable framework, we explored the existing literature from different disciplines for the said objectives. We categorized them along various dimensions, developed taxonomy, identified gaps and challenges, proposed a solution, developed a theory-driven framework with its transformation to microblogs, and suggested key areas of research.
Drawing on signalling theory, this study aims to fill a gap in knowledge by examining the effects of celebrity trust on advertising credibility, brand credibility and corporate credibility, both ...directly and based on the moderating variables of age, gender and ethnicity. The research has three objectives: (i) to explore the effects of celebrity trust on advertising credibility, brand credibility and corporate credibility; (ii) to explore the effects of celebrity trust on advertising credibility, brand credibility and corporate credibility, based on the moderating effects of consumer demographics; and (iii) to explore the effects of the other constructs on each other. A survey of 625 respondents was conducted in London. The results show that celebrity trust has a positive effect on both advertising credibility and brand credibility, and that these effects are moderated by consumers’ ethnicity, with no effects of age or gender. The significant implications for managers and researchers are highlighted.
Research Summary
We used interviews with elite informants as a case study to illustrate the need to expand the discussion of transparency and replicability to qualitative methodology. An analysis of ...52 articles published in Strategic Management Journal revealed that none of them were sufficiently transparent to allow for exact replication, empirical replication, or conceptual replication. We offer 12 transparency criteria, and behaviorally‐anchored ratings scales to measure them, that can be used by authors as they plan and conduct qualitative research as well as by journal reviewers and editors when they evaluate the transparency of submitted manuscripts. We hope our article will serve as a catalyst for improving the degree of transparency and replicability of future qualitative research.
Managerial Summary
If organizations implement practices based on published research, will they produce results consistent with those reported in the articles? To answer this question, it is critical that published articles be transparent in terms of what has been done, why, and how. We investigated 52 articles published in Strategic Management Journal that reported interviewing elite informants (e.g., members of the top management team) and found that none of the articles were sufficiently transparent. These results lead to thorny questions about the trustworthiness of published research, but also important opportunities for future improvements about research transparency and replicability. We offer recommendations on 12 transparency criteria, and how to measure them, that can be used to evaluate past as well as future research using qualitative methods.
The growth of Instagram continues, with the majority of its users being young women. This study investigates the impact of Instagram upon source credibility, consumer buying intention and social ...identification with different types of celebrities. In-depth interviews were conducted with 18 female Instagram users aged 18–30 to determine the extent to which Instagram influences their buying behaviour. The research findings show that celebrities on Instagram are influential in the purchase behaviour of young female users. However, non-traditional celebrities such as bloggers, YouTube personalities and ‘Instafamous’ profiles are more powerful, as participants regard them as more credible and are able to relate to these, rather than more traditional, celebrities. Female users are perceptively aware and prefer to follow Instagram profiles that intentionally portray positive images and provide encouraging reviews.
•Online celebrity endorsements are perceived to be credible and trustworthy when communicating marketing messages.•Personal experience of online celebrities enhances the credibility of their communication.•Female online celebrities are most influential, as these categories are more credible and relevant to young women.•No negative reviews regarding products are posted by users in order to maintain a positive online self-presentation.
Fake or manipulated images propagated through the Web and social media have the capacity to deceive, emotionally distress, and influence public opinions and actions. Yet few studies have examined how ...individuals evaluate the authenticity of images that accompany online stories. This article details a 6-batch large-scale online experiment using Amazon Mechanical Turk that probes how people evaluate image credibility across online platforms. In each batch, participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 28 news-source mockups featuring a forged image, and they evaluated the credibility of the images based on several features. We found that participants’ Internet skills, photo-editing experience, and social media use were significant predictors of image credibility evaluation, while most social and heuristic cues of online credibility (e.g. source trustworthiness, bandwagon, intermediary trustworthiness) had no significant impact. Viewers’ attitude toward a depicted issue also positively influenced their credibility evaluation.
The goal of our research is to create a predictive model of Web content credibility evaluations, based on human evaluations. The model has to be based on a comprehensive set of independent factors ...that can be used to guide user’s credibility evaluations in crowdsourced systems like WOT, but also to design machine classifiers of Web content credibility. The factors described in this article are based on empirical data. We have created a dataset obtained from an extensive crowdsourced Web credibility assessment study (over 15 thousand evaluations of over 5000 Web pages from over 2000 participants). First, online participants evaluated a multi-domain corpus of selected Web pages. Using the acquired data and text mining techniques we have prepared a code book and conducted another crowdsourcing round to label textual justifications of the former responses. We have extended the list of significant credibility assessment factors described in previous research and analyzed their relationships to credibility evaluation scores. Discovered factors that affect Web content credibility evaluations are also weakly correlated, which makes them more useful for modeling and predicting credibility evaluations. Based on the newly identified factors, we propose a predictive model for Web content credibility. The model can be used to determine the significance and impact of discovered factors on credibility evaluations. These findings can guide future research on the design of automatic or semi-automatic systems for Web content credibility evaluation support. This study also contributes the largest credibility dataset currently publicly available for research: the Content Credibility Corpus (C3).
The presence of fake news via Internet media compels researchers and practitioners to understand the consequences of this phenomenon on marketing activities. Surprisingly, no marketing study to date ...has analyzed the effect of fake news on consumers' evaluations of a brand advertised on the same webpage. To fill this gap, this study empirically investigated whether individuals' perceptions of fake news transfer to an adjacent brand advertisement. Specifically, we manipulated news truthfulness and source credibility, observing the change in individuals' responses while distinguishing between objective truthfulness and the perceived credibility of the news.
The results confirmed that the news' objective truthfulness exerts no direct effect on behavioral intentions toward the brand (i.e., intention to purchase, spread word-of-mouth, or visit the brand's store). However, we did uncover a chain of effects whereby the impact of fake news on behavioral intentions was fully mediated by people's perceptions of the news' credibility, which affected the perceived credibility of the sources, which then influenced brand trust, which finally translated into brand attitudes. From a managerial perspective, this study's results can partially reassure brand managers that their brand advertisements will not suffer from appearing next to fake news when the source itself is credible.
•The presence of fake news indirectly affects behavioral intentions toward a brand advertised on the same webpage.•This mechanism holds when the source is not reliable per se (intrinsic source credibility is low).•However, the results no longer hold when the source is reliable a priori (intrinsic source credibility is high).•The causal path is not affected by individuals' perceived ability to discern real from fake news.
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