Open Access

Jana Schumacher

• Trust is key for a functioning society and an important factor in the process of communication. Within the last few years, studies have shown a significant rise in the use of social networks for gathering information about current news and events. The social network Facebook has become a key player in the distribution of different kinds of contents, including news content. This leads to various problems, as the purpose of Face-book is a different one. It doesn’t work like a news website and thus, doesn’t necessarily provide quality news content, that can be trusted. The aim of this thesis is to generate scientific results to better understand the reception of news content within a social online environment like it is provided by Facebook. Therefore, a sample of Facebook Users has been interviewed and asked questions concerning their views on factors like accuracy, actuality or the presentation of facts and sources within distributed news content on Facebook, assuming that these contribute to the perception of credibility and their existence leads to trust. The results show, that transparency of relevant sources is the most important factor influencing credibility perception. In favour of a theoretical basis, the thesis sums up the current state of re-search in the fields of news consumption and reception processes, as well as trust and credibility within the study of media. The research results are shown and interpreted in the third chapter and utilized to give a final outlook on better acquaintance of social news consumption.