I am going to have to disagree with Anam. Majority opinion does not make something right, even on social media. If that were true, every social cause would have failed In the U.S.: slavery, minority rights, women's rights, child labor laws, environmental protection, gay/lesbian rights, etc. all of these ideas were once thought absurd. Might (or agreement) does not make right. The ancient Greeks believed that "Man was the measure of all things." By that they believed that truth was contingent, based on opinion (or argument) not fact. People are often just as afraid of expressing their views on social media for a number of reasons as they are of writing it in a newspaper. General agreement with a false premise of bad idea by the majority does not make something right. In practice, credibility via social media is seen as agreement with the source (i.e., how many subscribers does someone have), which is I think what Anam means here. But this ignores the complexity of social media. Social media should be used to encourage people to think for themselves (such as we do with comments here). How many subscribers someone has has nothing to do with the the strength of their ideas. In rhetoric, credibility if often described as "competence, integrity, and goodwill." That is a better measure than agreement I think.

True Sahifa, credibility is an issue but like everything else there is a self correcting mechanism. Just as the Social media is becoming a more important part of our lives, the users are becoming more media literate. Thus, it is becoming more and more difficult to pass of suspicious content as genuine.

I totally agree with you, Qurratulann. This process, we can observe also with respect to digital news journalism, digital tv channels, digital publishers (especially in scientific literature, ...), digital info portals, etc.

Social media are playing a great role in multiplying the amount of data in internet( I think it's the first source of data in terms of quantity), as far as the ubiquitous computing is concerned, the internet of things is indirectly linked to social media in terms of user behavioral and subjective data. There is no option just to go ahead and design new methods to deal with these huge amount of social data. By the way, any applications can be greatly performed and upgraded when using social data for efficient operation.

Thank you all

I am going to have to disagree with Anam. Majority opinion does not make something right, even on social media. If that were true, every social cause would have failed In the U.S.: slavery, minority rights, women's rights, child labor laws, environmental protection, gay/lesbian rights, etc. all of these ideas were once thought absurd. Might (or agreement) does not make right. The ancient Greeks believed that "Man was the measure of all things." By that they believed that truth was contingent, based on opinion (or argument) not fact. People are often just as afraid of expressing their views on social media for a number of reasons as they are of writing it in a newspaper. General agreement with a false premise of bad idea by the majority does not make something right. In practice, credibility via social media is seen as agreement with the source (i.e., how many subscribers does someone have), which is I think what Anam means here. But this ignores the complexity of social media. Social media should be used to encourage people to think for themselves (such as we do with comments here). How many subscribers someone has has nothing to do with the the strength of their ideas. In rhetoric, credibility if often described as "competence, integrity, and goodwill." That is a better measure than agreement I think.

Look at how many people are publishing articles, blog posts, editorial, and other commentary about how social media is a giant scam, a scheme, a shell game, and little more than a high school popularity contest as a consequence of badly behaving marketers. So many people are doing such a poor job of representing the space that they're poisoning the well for everyone else.

in this case I tend to support Qurratulann's comment, otherwise It would be necessary to type very long comment, probably supporting both Anam's and Michael's views.

Nice sample of credibility could be professional technical discussion groups, because these usually contain highly educated and fact-knowing experts in given area.

There isnt possible to declare himself/herself as expert by one's own decision there and sometimes it is also hard to prove righntness of comment, caused usually by its shortage.

Just, avoiding deeper assesment, Christian religion started as minority with one leader and 10 disciples. After years it has turned into majority.

It took about 1500 years to ballance things again.

Sahifa, to answer your question i would say i agree more or less with Michael. As i dont think the snowball is always really a "snow-white-credible" one. sometimes it truns out to be just a huge bloody one. I can tell that "Syrians" experienced that during the syrian revolution - then war- . Simply putting it., that was the test or citizen journalism, social networks as source of news and industrial/traditional media huge institutions practices. In reality what turned out is that credibility was missing at both sides of the war fence. why? because there was no access of diversified media to the ground. the syrian regime blocked all media and arrested citizen journalists. that is when money from different countries started to pure in to manipulate the "image" of reality. several forign and local jorunalists died just when they were about to cover critical facts on the ground.

On the other hand, social media is full of faked profiles as well fabricated information. unfortunately sensational news is still capable of generating the biggest "balls". In fact i am working on a news verification model . For the time being i can advice you to check the European Journalism center for the book they published recently about tools to verify online social news. that would be helpful.