Abstract
Social media provides enormous loads of information for its users paired with easy sharing mechanisms such as liking or retweeting. In such an environment it is not easy to accurately judge every tweet or post piece by piece, in which case individuals rely on easy strategies to evaluate information. In this research, the role of the source credibility and verification strategies of users were investigated to understand how individuals assess the information quality on Twitter and under which circumstances they share information. A quantitative study was conducted using Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results show that peripheral cues, namely the source credibility has a strong influence on how people perceive the quality of information.
Recommended Citation
Haug, Maximilian, "Endorse the Source – The Impact of Information Assessment on News Sharing Behavior" (2019). AMCIS 2019 Proceedings. 17.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2019/virtual_communities/virtual_communities/17
Endorse the Source – The Impact of Information Assessment on News Sharing Behavior
Social media provides enormous loads of information for its users paired with easy sharing mechanisms such as liking or retweeting. In such an environment it is not easy to accurately judge every tweet or post piece by piece, in which case individuals rely on easy strategies to evaluate information. In this research, the role of the source credibility and verification strategies of users were investigated to understand how individuals assess the information quality on Twitter and under which circumstances they share information. A quantitative study was conducted using Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results show that peripheral cues, namely the source credibility has a strong influence on how people perceive the quality of information.