With great power comes great social responsibility

Abstract: The overall vagueness of words and sentences can show differences in meaning and perceptions. Applying this to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives can end up being misleading, especially in an online setting such as social media, which has shown as a preferable medium for these kinds of messages. This awoke a curiosity within us as we ourselves have a critical way of thinking because of our studies within media communication and our own experiences with social media messages being somewhat misleading and shady in their nature. With theories and previous research from several authors revolving around complex concepts such as trust, transparency and authenticity. A definition of trustworthiness has been established to be used for this particular bachelor thesis for the basis of our variables and analysis of the results. This study aims to measure if trustworthiness in CSR posts on Instagram change depending on different levels of transparency. Research is conducted with a quantitative experiment with three web-based surveys containing each a different stimuli taking inspiration from real-life companies posts on Instagram. The results showed that the perceived trustworthiness changes depending on the levels of transparency, with a high trustworthiness towards message and action in an Instagram post of high transparency. Instagram posts with mid-range and low levels of transparency showed similarities but the post with low affinity of transparency showed the least amount of perceived trustworthiness.