Where the Ball Starts Rolling? An Empirical Investigation into Initial Opinion Formation on Social Media Platforms

Social media users routinely encounter unfamiliar, high-stakes information and form impressions that shape what they believe, share, and act on. This article shows that these first impressions can stabilize after only a small, bounded run of consistent exposure, creating an early “sufficiency” point after which additional posts add little. Once this early stance forms, it guides downstream engagement: users are more receptive to information that aligns with their initial view and less responsive to information that challenges it. Importantly for practice and policy, early judgments are often weakly tied to factual accuracy under low-effort scrolling, making it difficult for later corrections to fully reverse the effects of early exposure. The study also demonstrates that source cues matter: professional titles and affiliations can outweigh visible platform signals such as badges and popularity metrics when people evaluate unfamiliar content. Together, these findings suggest that platforms and regulators should prioritize upstream interventions—verifying expertise claims before allowing professional titles to be displayed, strengthening domain-specific credibility signals, and ensuring authoritative information reaches users early in exposure sequences—especially in sensitive areas such as health, finance, and public safety.