What causes more mistrust: profile owners deleting user-generated content or website contributors masking their identities?

Antecedents and Effects of Online Third-Party Information on Offline Impressions

“…Neither the identifiability of third parties (H2) nor the claims themselves (including the number of third-party claims [H3] and aggregate user-representations [i.e., average rating; H4]) influenced whether the information was perceived to reflect the offline characteristics of the target professor faithfully (i.e., the claim’s warranting value). These findings run counter to prior work indicating system properties can influence the warranting value of claims (e.g., Carr & Stefaniak, 2012; DeAndrea, Tong et al, 2018; Tong et al, 2008). Instead, these results suggest warranting value may be a property of the particular message or claim, rather than an innate property of the channel or its displays.…”

Persuasiveness of online product recommendations : the roles of warranting theory and credibility

“…Further research in warranting theory has attempted to qualify the assumption that other-generated information is less immune to manipulation than self claims, by introducing information control mechanisms that show how other-generated information can sometimes be highly manipulated (e.g., DeAndrea et al, 2017;DeAndrea, Van Der Heide, & Easley, 2015). This study aimed to show that the credibility of the source of other-generated information-as a mechanism distinct from perceived immunity to manipulation-is also an important consideration when assessing the reliability of the information.…”

“…As a consequence, people placed greater trust in reviews on a review platform than reviews on a proprietary website. In another study involving a fictitious job search website, job seekers who could delete reviews that others wrote about them were rated as less employable than those who could not (DeAndrea et al, 2017).…”

“…Authenticity is not an entirely new concept. Rather, this study uses it as an umbrella term to describe some of what scholars have been studying about warranting theory and credibility, such as whether communicators are who they claim to be (e.g., DeAndrea, Tong, & Lim, 2017) and the real identities of communicators (e.g., Metzger, Flanagin, & Medders, 2010), to facilitate the integration of warranting theory and credibility. This study posits that authenticity has three dimensions: reality, sincerity, and reliability.…”

“…When fake reviewers were suspected to be the source of online reviews, individuals rated the reviewed entity less favorably and were less likely to recommend it to others (DeAndrea, Van Der Heide, Vendemia, et al, 2015). Similarly, the verisimilitude of reviewers who wrote positively about an individual influenced observers' perceptions of that individual: Observers perceived the discussed individual more favorably when reviewers were verified than when reviewers were unverified (DeAndrea et al, 2017).…”