Shaping Trust Through Information Processing: How Social Media Risk Information Affects Government Trust During a Crisis

Trust-shaping is an important element of government risk management in the social media era. Studies to date have focused on the negative impact of exposure to social media risk information on government trust in a crisis, which mainly transpires by increasing the visibility of trust factors and stimulating negative perceptions. This study proposes another possible explanation from the perspective of information insufficiency and empirically tests it using 18,949 questionnaire data from China during a major emerging pandemic. The results show that social media risk information has a positive effect on central government trust, fully mediated by information insufficiency, and a negative effect on local government trust, fully mediated by negative affective risk response. This study also examined the paradoxical nature of the social media environment, in which truth and misinformation coexist. Misinformation was found to moderate the effect of risk facts on government trust by decreasing information insufficiency rather than increasing negative affective risk response. By distinguishing between levels of government, introducing a mediating role for information insufficiency, and examining the potential positive effects of ambivalent information environments, this study enhances our understanding of the dynamics of government trust during a crisis in the social media era.