Abstract:

Social media have increasingly penetrated most human activities and redefined people's lifestyles to a point that they are considered the greatest social change since the Industrial Revolution. The capabilities they provide to users are not limited to communicating and keeping in touch with friends, acquaintances, and family, but also extend to searching, posting and disseminating a multitude of news and information on personal and public issues. Evaluating online information is a complex task. The aim of this study was to closely look into what elements and characteristics of the post itself and which personality traits of the information recipients themselves may influence the evaluation process of Instagram posts.

Data were collected from 203 students, ages 15-17 years, who responded to questionnaires about demographics, personality traits, use of social media, and pre-existing knowledge relating to the four sets of Instagram posts they were subsequently asked to evaluate. Data were analyzed quantitatively using SPSS and qualitatively.

Findings:
Most students (36%) considered source credibility in their answer, while 19.2% of the students ignored author expertise but focused on whether the content of the post was believable to them. The majority of the students (39.9%) based their evaluation on the content of the post and ignored the gender of the author. Students did not take into account the authors’ photo. The final comparison focused on whether the number of likes influenced students’ evaluations; however, most students (41.9%) were not influenced by the number of likes but by the wording of the post. Chi-square analyses indicated no statistically significant relations between gender and evaluation for each one of the four posts, suggesting that gender was not an influential factor in the evaluations. Spearman’s rho tests comparing prior knowledge and each post’s evaluation indicated positive relationships for three of the four posts.

Discussion:
The above findings suggest that the believability of a post is influenced by how it is written and how it resonates with what the students believe about the topic and less by who writes it. Prior knowledge probably influences how an adolescent interprets a post. These findings support that schools should focus on developing pupils’ critical thinking for accurate and objective information evaluation, as well as distinguishing truthful messages from misinformation. In this study we chose, on purpose, not to present students with misinformation for ethical reasons, seeking instead to focus on examining what may influence the evaluation of information on Instagram posts. Future studies may investigate this issue in a naturalistic setting, so that ethical issues about intentionally exposing student to misinformative content can be mitigated. The finding that many students pay more attention to the content of the post and how it is presented, rather than on source expertise, indicates that there is room for further media literacy initiatives that will support noticing multiple post characteristics when making an evaluative decision. Finally, the findings of this study suggest that it is important for students to acquire and expand their knowledge on a variety of topics, as these contribute to accurate assessment.

Keywords:

Information evaluation, social media, Instagram, media and information literacy, adolescents, informal learning.