Interpersonal Trust within Social Media Applications: A Conceptual Literature Review

Abstract

Interpersonal trust within social media applications is a highly discussed topic. The debate ranges from trusting the application, related to security and privacy, to trusting content and the underlying content delivery algorithms. Several trust-related phenomena have surfaced in recent years, known as filter bubbles, echo chambers and fake news. Addressing these phenomena is often pushed to either the regulator or directly to the provider of the social media application. Interpersonal trust within social media applications is a more complex topic and not limited to the application or the content, but has to include the behaviour of the user. To broaden the debate beyond the prevalent focus on the application and content this paper presents a conceptual literature review studying interpersonal trust within social media with the goal to deepen the understanding of the complex interplay between user behaviour in relation to interpersonal trust. Based on this review modalities of interpersonal trust are identified and presented. To extend on these findings an information-dense word embedding based analysis is presented by using unsupervised machine learning techniques.