Do People Trust Information from Social Media?

Social media may have started with the simple notion of casually connecting friends and relatives, but from those origins, have become complex of overlapping nexus involving every sort of human activity imaginable. Users of social media have shown themselves to be a contradiction- both savvy and gullible in their consumption and transfer of information. The nature of information quality in the context of social media is mostly unstudied and consequently, mostly not understood. The quality of information moving through social media, and the social media users’ confidence in the quality of the information, are vital factors to be studied in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of such an important global phenomenon. This research investigates users’ trust in information obtained from social media