What causes more mistrust: profile owners deleting user-generated content or website contributors masking their identities?

ABSTRACT

People regularly rely on user-generated contributions to websites to inform their opinions about people, companies, organizations, and products. This study examines how two website affordances uniquely affect the evaluation of user-generated content. Specifically, an experiment was conducted that varied whether a website (a) affords profile owners the ability to delete user-generated contributions or (b) verifies the identity of users who post evaluations of profile owners. The results suggest that although deleting user-generated content is viewed as more problematic, both forms of information control independently affect how viewers evaluate a website and the content it hosts. The findings help establish the conditions under which certain forms of information control differentially produce uncertainty and mistrust and thus have direct implications for warranting theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Warranting theory
• impression management
• social media
• online reviews
• deception
• online employee evaluations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

David C. DeAndrea (PhD, 2011, Michigan State University) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at the Ohio State University. His research examines how communication technology affects processes of impression management, deception, social influence, and support-seeking [email: [email protected]].

Stephanie Tom Tong (PhD, 2011, Michigan State University) is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Wayne State University. She investigates the intersection of social media and interpersonal relationships. Her work focuses on how people use technology to initiate, maintain, and terminate relationships with family, friends, and romantic partners [email: [email protected]].

Young-shin Lim (PhD, The Ohio State University, 2016) is an Assistant Professor in the Amsterdam School of Communication Research at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on persuasion in social media [email: [email protected]].