Manipulating the Perception of Credibility in Refugee Related Social Media Posts

Abstract

This paper describes a controlled web-based study (n=126), investigating whether the perception of the credibility of refugee-related Tweets can be influenced by cues already reported in the literature for social media content generally. We provide empirical evidence that both a Tweet's popularity and the presence of links -- even neutral links created by URL shortening services -- may increase a user's belief that the Tweet contains credible information. This is important because the propagation of false information relating to refugees on social media sites has been well documented.