Authenticity Issues of Social Media:Credibility, Quality and Reality

Abstract

Social media has led to paradigm shifts in ways people work and do business, interact and socialize, learn and obtainknowledge. So much so that social media has established itself as animportant spatial extension of this nation’s historicity and challenges.Regardless of the enabling reputation and recommendation featuresthrough social networks embedded in the social media system, theoverflow of broadcasted and publicized media contents turns thetable around from engendering trust to doubting the trust system.When the trust is at doubt, the effects include deactivation of accounts and creation of multiple profiles, which lead to the overflowof ‘ghost’ contents (i.e. “the abundance of abandoned ships”). Inmost literature, the study of trust can be related to culture; hence thedifference between Western’s “openness” and Eastern’s “blue-chip”concepts in networking and relationships. From a survey on issuesand challenges among Malaysian social media users, ‘authenticity’emerges as one of the main factors that causes and is caused by other factors. The other issue that has surfaced is credibility either in termsof message/content and source. Another is the quality of theknowledge that is shared. This paper explores the terrains of thiscritical space which in recent years has been dominated increasingly by, arguably, social networks embedded in the social media system,the overflow of broadcasted and publicized media content.