Researchers and practitioners alike often overlook the vital relationship between trust and social media. ... Authors Joanna Paliszkiewicz and Alex Koohang charted a course to explore this abyss with a view to answering the question how does trust influence the use of social media. [i]Dr. John P. Girard, Peyton Anderson Endowed Chair in Information Technology, Middle Georgia State University[/i] The authors have done an excellent job in explaining how trust plays a significant role in social media. The book begins with a thorough overview of social media to its applications in learning, business, and an analysis of social media and trust. The second part of the book uses data from four different countries to answer multiple valid and vital research questions dealing with social media and trust, including an instrument that measures trust variables. This book presents some meaningful work on how the integration of social media and trust can best be developed. The authors apply their backgrounds in information technology, knowledge management, trust, and business to generate some provocative and instructive guidance to the readers on how to best leverage knowledge internally and externally to meet the organizational strategic goals. [i]Dr. Jay Liebowitz, Distinguished Chair of Applied Business and Finance, Harrisburg University of Science and Technology

Social media greatly enables people to participate in online activities and shatters the barrier for online users to create and share information at any place at any time. However, the explosion of user-generated content poses novel challenges for online users to find relevant information, or, in other words, exacerbates the information overload problem. On the other hand, the quality of user-generated content can vary dramatically from excellence to abuse or spam, resulting in a problem of information credibility. The study and understanding of trust can lead to an effective approach to addressing both information overload and credibility problems. Trust refers to a relationship between a trustor (the subject that trusts a target entity) and a trustee (the entity that is trusted). In the context of social media, trust provides evidence about with whom we can trust to share information and from whom we can accept information without additional verification. With trust, we make the mental shortcut by directly seeking information from trustees or trusted entities, which serves a two-fold purpose: without being overwhelmed by excessive information (i.e., mitigated information overload) and with credible information due to the trust placed on the information provider (i.e., increased information credibility). Therefore, trust is crucial in helping social media users collect relevant and reliable information, and trust in social media is a research topic of increasing importance and of practical significance. This book takes a computational perspective to offer an overview of characteristics and elements of trust and illuminate a wide range of computational tasks of trust. It introduces basic concepts, deliberates challenges and opportunities, reviews state-of-the-art algorithms, and elaborates effective evaluation methods in the trust study. In particular, we illustrate properties and representation models of trust, elucidate trust prediction with representative algorithms, and demonstrate real-world applications where trust is explicitly used. As a new dimension of the trust study, we discuss the concept of distrust and its roles in trust computing.

Consumer trust is more important than ever, as digital platforms and social media have redefined the relationship between businesses and consumers. In this new and disruptive commercial environment, consumers have developed an expectancy of direct, transparent communication through social media. The traditional means of building and maintaining trust have been rendered obsolete by the chaotic, competitive magnitude of multiple online platforms. With a unique combination of academic rigor and practical guidance, Digital Trust is the definitive guide to effectively using social media to build an authentic, trustful connection with your consumer base. Drawing on his extensive experience in marketing and communications, Barry Connolly demonstrates how to harness the commercial opportunities provided by social media, while also showing how you can avoid its most common mistakes and pitfalls. With original research and illuminating case studies, Digital Trust provides adaptable and accessible social media strategies that will strengthen and expand your consumer base.--

Trust is important – it influences new technologies adoption and learning, enhances using social media, new technologies, IoT, and blockchain, and it contributes to the practical implementations of cybersecurity policy in organizations. This edited research volume examines the main issues and challenges associated with privacy and trust on social media in a manner relevant to both practitioners and scholars. Readers will gain knowledge across disciplines on trust and related concepts, theoretical underpinnings of privacy issues and trust on social media, and empirically-validated trust-building practice on social media. Social Media, Privacy Issues and Trust-building aims to bring together the theory and practice of social media, privacy issues, and trust. It offers a look at the current state of trust and privacy, including a comprehensive overview of both research and practical applications. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to researchers, students at an advanced level, and academics, in the fields of business ethics, entrepreneurship, management of technology and innovation, marketing, and information management. Practitioners can also use the book as a toolbox to improve their understanding and promote opportunities related to building social media trust while taking into consideration of privacy issues.

We are entering the age of sustainability – a business era where every company, big and small, must adapt its way of doing business to meet the realities of climate change, a finite supply of natural resources, evolving attitudes about inequality, increasing digitisation and automation. At the same time companies must meet the demands of consumers as they adjust to this rapidly changing way of life. Supercharging this change in consumer behaviour is social media – a communications revolution that is democratising and disrupting society in ways never seen before. In this book, Matthew Yeomans explains why embracing sustainability is key to helping companies articulate their sense of purpose (and their reason to exist) in a world where social media is eroding trust in all institutions. The book shows how social media has made sustainability a mainstream concern for all society, how it compelled companies to be more authentic and accountable in their actions and how it will continue to shape how companies communicate the importance of sustainability to all of society. This book is a powerful guide for both communication and marketing professionals in business, especially Fortune 500, FTSE 250 companies and agencies, on how to use social media to communicate with their audiences and stakeholders in an authentic way. It is also a guide/text book for the growing field of sustainability communication in higher education.

Knowledge and expertise, especially of the kind that can shape public opinion, have been traditionally the domain of individuals holding degrees awarded by higher learning institutions or occupying formal positions in notable organizations. Expertise is validated by reputations established in an institutionalized marketplace of ideas with a limited number of “available seats” and a stringent process of selection and retention of names, ideas, topics and facts of interest. However, the social media revolution, which has enabled over two billion Internet users not only to consume, but also to produce information and knowledge, has created a secondary and very active informal marketplace of ideas and knowledge. Anchored by platforms like Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, this informal marketplace has low barriers to entry and has become a gigantic and potentially questionable, knowledge resource for the public at large. Roles, Trust and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets will discuss some of the emerging trends in defining, measuring and operationalizing reputation as a new and essential component of the knowledge that is generated and consumed online. The book will propose a future research agenda related to these issues. The ultimate goal of research agenda being to shape the next generation of theoretical and analytic strategies needed for understanding how knowledge markets are influenced by social interactions and reputations built around functional roles. The authors, including leading scholars and young innovators, will share with the readers some of the main lessons they have learned from their own work in these areas and will discuss the issues, topics and sub-areas that they find under-studied or that promise the greatest intellectual payoff in the future. The discussion will be placed in the context of social network analysis and “big data” research. Roles, Trust and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets exposes issues that have not been satisfactorily dealt with in the current literature, as the research agenda in reputation and authorship is still emerging. In a broader sense, the volume aims to change the way in which knowledge generation in social media spaces is understood and utilized. The tools, theories and methodologies proposed by the contributors offer concrete avenues for developing the next generation of research strategies and applications that will help: tomorrow’s information consumers make smarter choices, developers to create new tools and researchers to launch new research programs.

Interpersonal trust within social media applications is a highly discussed topic. The debate ranges from trusting the application, related to security and privacy, to trusting content and the underlying content delivery algorithms. Several trust-related phenomena have surfaced in recent years, known as filter bubbles, echo chambers and fake news. Addressing these phenomena is often pushed to either the regulator or directly to the provider of the social media application. Interpersonal trust within social media applications is a more complex topic and not limited to the application or the content, but has to include the behaviour of the user. To broaden the debate beyond the prevalent focus on the application and content this paper presents a conceptual literature review studying interpersonal trust within social media with the goal to deepen the understanding of the complex interplay between user behaviour in relation to interpersonal trust. Based on this review modalities of interpersonal trust are identified and presented. To extend on these findings an information-dense word embedding based analysis is presented by using unsupervised machine learning techniques.

All over Europe and the World communication scientists reflect questions on trust in journalism and media. A large scale of analysis and research gives new perspectives of reasons, impacts and consequences of trust or mistrust in media and journalism. This anthology provides an overview on empirical research to trust in media and journalism, new perspectives, methodological approaches and current results, discussed among communication scientists at European and international scientific conferences.

The enormous success and diffusion that online social networks (OSNs) are encountering nowadays is vastly apparent. Users' social interactions now occur using online social media as communication channels; personal information and activities are easily exchanged both for recreational and business purposes in order to obtain social or economic advantages. In this scenario, OSNs are considered critical applications with respect to the security of users and their resources, for their characteristics alone: the large amount of personal information they manage, big economic upturn connected to their commercial use, strict interconnection among users and resources characterizing them, as well as user attitude to easily share private data and activities with strangers. In this book, we discuss three main research topics connected to security in online social networks: (i) trust management, because trust can be intended as a measure of the perception of security (in terms of risks/benefits) that users in an OSN have with respect to other (unknown/little-known) parties; (ii) controlled information sharing, because in OSNs, where personal information is not only connected to user profiles, but spans across users' social activities and interactions, users must be provided with the possibility to directly control information flows; and (iii) identity management, because OSNs are subjected more and more to malicious attacks that, with respect to traditional ones, have the advantage of being more effective by leveraging the social network as a new medium for reaching victims. For each of these research topics, in this book we provide both theoretical concepts as well as an overview of the main solutions that commercial/non-commercial actors have proposed over the years. We also discuss some of the most promising research directions in these fields.

This book examines the shifting role of media trust in a digital world, and critically analyzes how news and stories are created, distributed and consumed. Emphasis is placed on the current challenges and possible solutions to regain trust and restore credibility. The book reveals the role of trust in communication, in society and in media, and subsequently addresses media at the crossroads, as evinced by phenomena like gatekeepers, echo chambers and fake news. The following chapters explore truth and trust in journalism, the role of algorithms and robots in media, and the relation between social media and individual trust. The book then presents case studies highlighting how media creates trust in the contexts of: brands and businesses, politics and non-governmental organizations, science and education. In closing, it discusses the road ahead, with a focus on users, writers, platforms and communication in general, and on media competency, skills and education in particular.