Ratioing and Credibility; The Effect of Like to Comment Ratio on the Perceived Credibility of Tweets

We are living at the apex of the communication era where people can easily share their news, experiences, and thoughts on social media which has created a lot of opportunities for us. However, wherever there is an opportunity, we will see opportunism as well. One of the current issues on social media is fake content and how to deal with them. In this article, we will show that cues such as the number of likes and comments of a tweet can play a significant role in its perceived credibility. More specifically and with analyzing both field and experimental data, we will demonstrate that the more like to comment ratio a post has, the more it is perceived as credible. We will also show that this perceived credibility comes from the channel of consensus cue which could be moderated by the susceptibility to the social influence of the user, their motivation, and their cognitive load. Moreover, as the boundary condition, we will show that only ratio matters for the perceived credibility and the order of magnitude of numbers don’t play a role in our conceptual model.