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

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.