The source of the story: Evaluating the credibility of crisis information sources

In a highly connected world, information coming from different media sources and social relationships are more quickly disseminated than ever before. Natural disasters such as Typhoon Haiyan capture attention globally. Investigations of how people respond to the credibility of different sources have implications for policy making and information systems design. In this paper, we studied how different factors (strength of social ties and sources of crisis information) affect perception of credibility of crisis information about natural disasters. Our analysis and findings indicate that for crisis information about natural disasters, people tend to trust traditional media channels, such as printed news, and televised news. The type of social tie also influences the perceived credibility of the crisis information.