The impact of anonymity on weblog credibility

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Abstract

A blog, or weblog, is an online diary whose writer is known as a blogger. Many bloggers choose to publish anonymously. This paper examines whether a blog by an anonymous blogger will be perceived as being any more or less credible than one by an identifiable blogger. Two studies were conducted in the UK to examine this, with one of the two studies being replicated in Malaysia. The first study presented respondents with a blog entry in one of three conditions: where the blogger was fully identifiable with a photograph, where only the age and sex of the blogger were revealed, and where only an alias was given for the blogger. Multi item constructs were used to measure the credibility of the blog and the blogger. No differences were found. Study 2 examined whether this was due to the presentation of the blog entry. This time respondents were shown one of two blog posts which conveyed exactly the same information and revealed exactly the same information about the blogger. One post introduced a number of spelling/grammar/punctuation errors. Results show that the well presented blog’s writer was perceived as being more credible than the writer of the badly presented blog, but there was no difference in the credibility of the blog itself. The implications of the results are discussed with reference to the use of blogs as a knowledge sharing tool.

Introduction

People are increasingly looking to the Web for information about all aspects of human life (Fallows, 2005). Due to the volume of information available and the lack of professional editors to monitor material, the credibility of Web content typically must be assessed by the reader (Metzger, 2007). This is problematic if inaccurate information is accepted at face value. Even professional journalists are guilty of this (for instance by using Wikipedia as a source only for it to be later revealed that the information used was incorrect; see: http://music.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2181878,00.html describing how false information edited into Wikipedia eventually found its way onto both BBC news and the UK’s Guardian newspaper). This paper concerns one specific type of Web content: blogs. A blog, or weblog, is an online diary. Typically, a blog is used to either document the writer’s life, or a topic that the writer has an interest in. From a technical point of view, there is no difference between a blog and a webpage. From a usability point of view, a blog is updated more frequently than a webpage, typically each day, and the updates, or posts, appear in reverse chronological order. Blogs have rapidly become very popular. A large number of hosting sites exist, such as mydeardiary.com, my-diary.org, blogger.com and blogit.com, which allow a user to publish a blog quickly and easily, and many personal home pages contain a blog. Technorati, a firm that tracks many millions of blogs, has claimed that 75,000 new blogs are created every day, on average, one every second of every day (LeClaire, 2006). This alone makes blogs a significant subject of study, however it is their ability to mobilize citizens and bring about social and political change that other writers (for instance Kaye, 2007) have argued is a key reason to study them, citing cases of journalists and politicians being forced to resign as a direct result of pressure from bloggers. It should however, be noted that while the number of blogs is increasing, they also have a high rate of abandonment.

Most blogs can be categorised either as a personal blog, which concerns the blogger’s life, or a knowledge blog (k-blog) which concerns a topic, although the distinction is blurred as the two are often intertwined. Blogs are increasingly being used as a source of information (Sweetser et al., 2008). A recent survey suggests that more than 30% of people online read blogs (Lenhart and Fox, 2006). Few studies have examined what motivates these readers. Kaye (2007) suggests information seeking is a key reason, with blogs seen by readers to provide them with news and in-depth analysis, up to date information and unfiltered content. Blogs are also used as a source of information on topics other than current events. Numerous blogs about software development are kept by Sun and Microsoft employees (Kelleher and Miller, 2006; for a list of Microsoft blogs see: blogs.msdn.com and http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,933657,00.asp). Blogs are used at Hewlett-Packard to collect, summarise and circulate news, web links, software and competitor information (Cayzer, 2004). They are being used in health research for continuous communication and as ‘manuals’ for laboratory work (Sauer et al., 2005), and in Higher Education by students to both document their learning (Williams and Jacobs, 2004) and as a searchable repository of material on a wide range of topics. Blogs are also viewed by intelligence agencies as important sources of information, especially those written by people in areas of interest where they do not have local agents (see: https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/press-release-archive-2005/pr11082005.html).

As blogs are used as a source of information, their credibility becomes an important topic of study. This paper examines one aspect of blog publishing – anonymity – and its impact on the perceived credibility of blogger and blog. Many blogs are published anonymously (Qian and Scott, 2007). There will be a variety of reasons for this and in itself this should not limit the potential usefulness of the content. It can easily be imagined that a victim of crime, or a patient suffering an embarrassing illness, or an employee describing poor working conditions all may want to keep their identity hidden, but that another victim, patient or employee may gain valuable information and even comfort from what is being written. Two studies are reported to determine the impact on credibility of writing a blog anonymously. Study 1, which was performed in the UK and repeated in Malaysia, uses a between subjects design, and presents respondents with a blog post with the information about the blogger varied from anonymous to identifiable. Data were collected on the perceived credibility of the blogger and the perceived credibility of the blog. Study 2 examines the results of Study 1 further, assessing whether how a blog entry is presented (well written to poorly written) has any impact on its credibility.

The paper is organised as follows. Section 2 examines factors that have previously been found to have an impact on the perceived credibility of online sources and presents the hypotheses tested in this paper. Section 3 explains how credibility was measured. The two studies are then explained in 4 Study 1, 5 Study 2, and discussed in Section 6.

Section snippets

Assessing the credibility of online resources

Most of the previous work in the area of online credibility has focused on webpage content rather than blog content. Whether there is any difference in the perceived credibility of the two has yet to be tested and care must therefore be taken when generalising from one to the other. The Internet has lowered the cost of both disseminating and accessing information (Metzger, 2007). Easy access and the lack of content editors have meant that end-users of information often need to assess for

Measuring credibility

This paper looks exclusively at source attributes, and makes two measures of credibility—the perceived credibility of the blogger, and the perceived credibility of the blog. Credibility is often understood to be believability—a credible blog is believable, a credible blogger is believable. In line with most other studies, credibility is considered here as being something subjective to the reader, perceived credibility rather than some sort of objective measure of the source material itself.

1 Method

Five hundred and eighty undergraduate business school students based in the UK were asked to participate in the study with 182(31%) agreeing to take part. These students were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions and asked to view a single blog post. The wording of each blog was identical and gave information about a medical problem in a typical blog style, as if someone suffering from problem was writing about it. This information was mixed in with details of their daily

Method

One possible explanation of the results of Study 1 is that respondents tend to evaluate the credibility of the blog and the blogger in terms of ‘how good the information sounds’ rather than giving consideration to fundamentals such as who wrote it and why. This theory was tested in a second experiment where 300 undergraduate business school students based in the UK, who had not been involved in the first study, were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions. The first group was

Discussion

This paper has looked at two aspects of blog publishing: anonymity and presentation. Study 1 examined whether writing a blog anonymously has any impact on perceived credibility. The results found no difference in perceived credibility when the blogger was identifiable and when they were anonymous; the identity of the writer was not being used by respondents to assess the credibility of the article. The reason for this is unknown, but there could be a number of explanations. Given that the mean

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