Crowdsourcing credibility: The impact of audience feedback on Web page credibility

Abstract

Social feedback in the form of audience ratings, community tags, recommendations, and text comments is becoming increasingly commonplace on the Web. Prior research has uncovered a number of Web site features that can impact its perceived credibility. However, to date research has not investigated whether social feedback on a Web page can influence the perceived credibility of the information on the page or increase or decrease the likelihood that an individual will subsequently use the information contained within it. This paper describes a study investigating whether one type of social feedback, audience ratings, can influence perceptions of credibility. The results of the study suggest that the type of audience feedback, positive, mixed, or negative, can influence perceptions of credibility while the size of the audience giving feedback does not. Also, audience feedback does not appear to increase the likelihood of use of the information on a web page.