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Who can an organization believe in social media? Exploring the process of believability assessment

Nilsson, Marcus LU and Alserud, Fredrik LU (2017) INFM10 20171
Department of Informatics
Abstract (Swedish)
Data driven decision-making is becoming more and more important for an organization to stay competitive. Data collected and analyzed from social media can teach an organization about its customers in a way that was not possible before. However, in social media there is circulating a lot of data with questionable believability, such as fake news, which risks influencing an organization’s decision-making. This has increased the need to assess the information sources’ credibility in social media, to filter out what and who that is not believable. To examine this assessment process, this study conducted five interviews with four organizations, exploring what dimensions that are considered important in the assessment process, and how they are... (More)
Data driven decision-making is becoming more and more important for an organization to stay competitive. Data collected and analyzed from social media can teach an organization about its customers in a way that was not possible before. However, in social media there is circulating a lot of data with questionable believability, such as fake news, which risks influencing an organization’s decision-making. This has increased the need to assess the information sources’ credibility in social media, to filter out what and who that is not believable. To examine this assessment process, this study conducted five interviews with four organizations, exploring what dimensions that are considered important in the assessment process, and how they are assessed. This resulted in a refined process model, with the dimensions identity, reputation, and domain expertise as the most prominent. Additional findings are that the process is not governed by any policies or guidelines, and that the assessment process is manual and driven by intuition, which is the opposite of how data driven decisions are increasingly becoming more important. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
Nilsson, Marcus LU and Alserud, Fredrik LU
supervisor
organization
course
INFM10 20171
year
type
H1 - Master's Degree (One Year)
subject
keywords
social media, believability, source credibility, domain expertise, information quality management
report number
INF17-008
language
English
id
8910720
date added to LUP
2017-06-21 11:55:58
date last changed
2017-06-21 11:55:58
@misc{8910720,
  abstract     = {{Data driven decision-making is becoming more and more important for an organization to stay competitive. Data collected and analyzed from social media can teach an organization about its customers in a way that was not possible before. However, in social media there is circulating a lot of data with questionable believability, such as fake news, which risks influencing an organization’s decision-making. This has increased the need to assess the information sources’ credibility in social media, to filter out what and who that is not believable. To examine this assessment process, this study conducted five interviews with four organizations, exploring what dimensions that are considered important in the assessment process, and how they are assessed. This resulted in a refined process model, with the dimensions identity, reputation, and domain expertise as the most prominent. Additional findings are that the process is not governed by any policies or guidelines, and that the assessment process is manual and driven by intuition, which is the opposite of how data driven decisions are increasingly becoming more important.}},
  author       = {{Nilsson, Marcus and Alserud, Fredrik}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Who can an organization believe in social media? Exploring the process of believability assessment}},
  year         = {{2017}},
}