“This is Fake News!” – A Study on Friend Filtering Behavior in Social Networks from the Perspectives of Trust and Distrust

• Main Authors: Shu-Ting Liu, 劉姝廷
• Other Authors: 范錚強
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/9n5v97

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 資訊管理學系 === 106 === With the proliferation of Internet, social networking services (SNS) have deeply integrated in our lives, and many people cannot live without it. As such, social networking have become a popular and important research issue. During the USA presidential election in 2016, fake news on social media has surfaced as a major problem. One cannot easily distinguish true among the false, and some started to suspect all information received. Compare to active information search on a specific topic on the Internet, people are more inclined to use their own feeling and heuristics to make judgments. That leading a lot of misinformation. This study employs the theoretical basis of “heuristic,” “trust,” “distrust,” and “friend filtering” to postulate whether people’s attitude towards a friend changes after they read disputed posts post by him/her on the social media, and whether it affects the intention to filter him/her. A theoretical framework and related hypotheses were constructed and tested with a questionnaire survey. Questionnaires were distributed through e-mails and postings on social media. 176 valid responses were collected and analyzed with confirmatory factor analysis, SEM, and other statistical methods. Data analyses reveal that six of eight hypotheses in this study are support. It supported the hypothesis that “trust” is influence by “judgment on the disputed posts” and “disposition to trust.” Along the same line, “distrust” is influence by “judgment on the disputed posts” and “disposition to distrust.” Finally yet importantly, “intention to filter the friend” is influence by “trust” and “distrust.” This results show that the user's judgment on the disputed posts posted by friends on the social media will affect the user's trust and distrust of the friend. They will generate the intention to filter the friends due to trust and distrust. This study also indirectly confirms that the constructs of “trust” and “distrust” are not the two ends of a semantic scale, but rather, two distinct dimensions. This study suggests that enterprises that advertise on social media must attach importance to their post on social media but also user’s trust and distrust of the enterprises. In order to achieve the effectiveness of advertising on social networking sites.