Facebook as a Source of Information about Presidential Candidates: An Abstract

Social media has become a powerful tool for influencing opinions citizens have about politics, political candidates, and social issues. The social media environment today is characterized by a myriad of sources providing innumerable amounts of information, expressed as opinion or fact, about every imaginable subject in a public forum. There is some evidence that social media users do not exhibit different levels of trust in articles published by fictional versus a known news source (Sterrett et al. 2019). This counters prior research that found source cues important (Lee and Sundar 2013; The Media Project 2017) and information posted by trusted figures are far more credible than posted by non-trusted figures (Sterrett et al. 2019). The lack of clarity in results indicates research explaining people’s view about the credibility of information presented in social media outlets is nascent and a fertile subject area for further research.

Prior research has examined models to explain message (Appelman and Sundar 2016) and medium credibility (Fadl Elhadidi 2019; Ognyanova and Ball-Rokeach 2015) as individual constructs as well as contributing to information credibility (Li and Suh 2015). Because of the desire to improve the understanding how the credibility of information is perceived on social media, specifically Facebook – the second most popular online platform and most popular social media source for news (Gramlich 2019) – we are employing the elaboration likelihood model (Li and Suh 2015) for application to Presidential candidates. Information Credibility is expected to be positively related to media dependency, interactivity, medium transparency, argument strength, information quality, and personal expertise. Understanding what influences information credibility on Facebook allows political marketers to understand how to best put forward information about Presidential candidates that will be accepted by voters.

In addition to assessing the ELM model, we ask voters which sources of information, e.g., friends, family, celebrities, news media, community leaders, are trustworthy enough to influence for which Presidential candidate they would cast their vote. A ranking of most trusted sources about Presidential candidates on Facebook provides insight to political marketers which sources have the greatest impact on voters’ decision-making process.