Policy Role of Social Media in Developing Public Trust: Twitter communication with government leaders

Abstract

Citizens’ trust in a government is critical when the government utilizes Twitter to communicate with the public. This research collected 398 questionnaire samples from Korean citizens who communicate with a central government department via Twitter and employed a structured equation analysis. The study discovered that tweets coming from a leading (or an executive) government officer (e.g., a minister) played mediation role in increasing citizens’ perception of credibility in governmental Twitter feed. Furthermore, the citizens’ trust in governmental media functioned as a moderator for expanding their trust in government from an agency level to the overall government.

Key words:

• G2C communication
• trust expansion
• social media
• leading officer
• Korea

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government [2014S1A3A2044459].