This exploratory study examines how fire and police departments used online media during the 2012 Hurricane Sandy and how these media can be used to affect trust with members of the public during such an event. Using trust theory, we describe how online communications provide a means for emergency responders to appear trustworthy through online acts of ability, integrity, and benevolence. We co...

Social media are increasingly being used as a source of information during crises such as natural disasters and civil unrests. Nevertheless, there have been concerns about the quality and truthfulness of user-generated information. This study seeks to understand how users form trust in information on social media. Based on the elaboration likelihood model and the motivation, opportunity, and ab...

Social media are increasingly being used as a source of information during crises such as natural disasters and civil unrests. Nevertheless, there have been concerns about the quality and truthfulness of user-generated information. This study seeks to understand how users form trust in information on social media. Based on the elaboration likelihood model and the motivation, opportunity, and ab...

Drawing principally on examples and literature from the Anglosphere, the author argues that the high salience given to "trust" and "trustworthiness" in recent scholarly literature, and which (notably in Putnam's work) attributes declining trust to a widely mistrusted mass media does not acknowledge the trustbuilding potential (realised in some instances) of interactive "Web 2.0" applications. D...

Recent research has identified a relatively new trend among youth (12e24) living in violent urban neighborhoods. These youth use social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to brag about violence, make threats, recruit gang members and to plan criminal activity known as Internet banging. Studies have typically examined youth communication by mining data on social media and surv...

Facebook posts, YouTube videos, tweets and wooing political bloggers have become standard practice in marketing political campaigns. Research has demonstrated the effect of new media on a host of politically-related behavior, including political participation, knowledge acquisition, group formation and self-efficacy. Yet, issues related to media trust, media performance and candidate evaluation...

In recent years, electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has become an influential factor affecting Internet users' perceptions and behaviors (Chatterjee 2001; Lee et al. 2009). However, as more evidence demonstrating the utilization of fake eWOM has been discovered (Forrest and Cao 2010; Malbon 2013), Internet users' trust of eWOM may have been severely undermined, and they may have developed skeptici...

There is an ongoing debate over the activities of brands and companies in social media. Some researchers believe social media provide a unique opportunity for brands to foster their relationships with customers, while others believe the contrary. Taking the perspective of the brand community building plus the brand trust and loyalty literatures, our goal is to show how brand communities based o...