The Investigation of Social Media Data Thresholds for Opinion Formation

Abstract: The pervasive use of social media has grown to over two billion users to date, and is commonly utilized as a means to share information and shape world events. Evidence suggests that passive social media usage (i.e., viewing without taking action) has an impact on the user's perspective. This empirical influence over perspective could have significant impact on social events. Therefore, it is important to understand how social media contributes to the formation of an individual's perspective. A set of experimental tasks were designed to investigate empirically derived thresholds for opinion formation as a result of passive interactions with different social media data types (i.e., videos, images, and messages). With a better understanding of how humans passively interact with social media information, a paradigm can be developed that allows the exploitation of this interaction and plays a significant role in future military plans and operations.