Investigating the Effect of Attributes on User Trust in Social Media

One main challenge in social media is to identify trustworthy information. If we cannot recognize information as trustworthy, that information may become useless or be lost. Opposite, we could consume wrong or fake information with major consequences. How does a user handle the information provided before consuming it? Are the comments on a post, the author or votes essential for taking such a decision? Are these attributes considered together and which attribute is more important? To answer these questions, we developed a trust model to support knowledge sharing of user content in social media. This trust model is based on the dimensions of stability, quality, and credibility. Each dimension contains metrics (user role, user IQ, votes, etc.) that are important to the user based on data analysis. We present in this paper, an evaluation of the proposed trust model using conjoint analysis (CA) as an evaluation method. The results obtained from 348 responses, validate the trust model. A trust degree translator interprets the content as very trusted, trusted, untrusted, and very untrusted based on the calculated value of trust. Furthermore, the results show different importance for each dimension: stability 24%, credibility 35% and quality 41%.