Credibility

About: Credibility is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 13730 publications have been published within this topic receiving 331944 citations. The topic is also known as: believability & plausibility.

A Parsimonious Language Model of Social Media Credibility Across Disparate Events

Abstract: Social media has increasingly become central to the way billions of people experience news and events, often bypassing journalists---the traditional gatekeepers of breaking news. Naturally, this casts doubt on the credibility of information found on social media. Here we ask: Can the language captured in unfolding Twitter events provide information about the event's credibility? By examining the first large-scale, systematically-tracked credibility corpus of public Twitter messages (66M messages corresponding to 1,377 real-world events over a span of three months), and identifying 15 theoretically grounded linguistic dimensions, we present a parsimonious model that maps language cues to perceived levels of credibility. While not deployable as a standalone model for credibility assessment at present, our results show that certain linguistic categories and their associated phrases are strong predictors surrounding disparate social media events. In other words, the language used by millions of people on Twitter has considerable information about an event's credibility. For example, hedge words and positive emotion words are associated with lower credibility.

The Relationship of Attitudinal Components to Trust in Media

Abstract: Past research has proposed that the receiver's relationship to the content of a message will affect credibility attributed to the source. Current literature proposes explanatory mechanisms that require empirical distinctions among the various components of attitude, yet researchers often employ measures of “attitude extremity” that confound these components. This study follows Guttman's mathematical theory of attitude and its distinctions between four attitude components: direction, intensity, closure, and involvement. In a survey of 358 adults, relationships between trust in television news and newspaper coverage and each of the four components were tested for six current issues. Significant relationships were found for all four components. Results suggest that existing hypotheses relating credibility to attitude have not anticipated that credibility might be related to more than one component. Interactions occur in which the relation of credibility to one component would be modified by the presence of s...

Online health information search and evaluation: observations and semi-structured interviews with college students and maternal health experts.

Abstract: Background: While the Internet is a popular source of health information, health seekers’ inadequate skills to locate and discern quality information pose a potential threat to their healthcare decision-making Objectives: We aimed to examine health information search and appraisal behaviours among young, heavy users of the Internet Methods: In study 1, we observed and interviewed 11 college students about their search strategies and evaluation of websites In study 2, three health experts evaluated two websites selected as the best information sources in study 1 Results: Familiarity with health websites and confidence in search strategies were major factors affecting search and evaluation behaviours Website quality was mostly judged by aesthetics and peripheral cues of source credibility and message credibility In contrast to users’ favourable website evaluation, the experts judged the websites to be inappropriate and untrustworthy Conclusion: Our results highlight a critical need to provide young health seekers with resources and training that are specifically geared toward health information search and appraisal The role of health seekers’ knowledge and involvement with the health issue in search effort and success warrants future research