Unethical But Not Illegal : Uncovering the Persuasive Messages Leveraged by Providers of the 'Real' Online Social Impressions

Abstrakti
Due to the drastically elevated prominence of social networking sites (SNS), online social impressions such as views, comments, followers, subscribers, likes, and dislikes have become a valuable currency that translates to popularity, credibility, and even financial gains. Aside from machine-generated impressions, a growing industry known as crowdturfing utilizes human workers to provide “real” social impressions as-a-service. Although crowdturfing platforms are often seen as a clear example of deceptive conduct, they justify their business by leveraging well-crafted persuasive strategies and ethical appeals. Given the increasingly significant role of online impressions on shaping people’s views and opinions, the servitization of these impressions calls for a clearer understanding. To address this call, we set out to investigate 1) What persuasive strategies do crowdturfing agents leverage to promote their service offerings?; and 2) To what extent these offerings can be ethically justified? Our analysis reveals utilization of three key persuasive strategies – namely, educational messages, bragging messages, and reassuring messages. Moreover, we find that they use various ethical appeals which largely depend on the conception of what ‘real’ means. The theoretical and practical significance of these findings are discussed.
Päätekijät
Aineistotyyppi
Konferenssit Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa
Julkaistu
2018
Aiheet
Julkaisu tutkimustietojärjestelmässä
Julkaisija
European Conference on Information Systems
Alkuperäislähde
https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2018_rp/172
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:jyu-201901281315Käytä tätä linkitykseen
Emojulkaisun ISBN
978-1-86137-667-1
Vertaisarvioinnin tila
Vertaisarvioitu
Konferenssi
European Conference on Information Systems
Kieli
englanti
Kuuluu julkaisuun
ECIS 2018 : Proceedings of the 26th European Conference on Information Systems, Portsmouth, UK, 23-28 June
Viite
  • Soliman, W., & Rinta-Kahila, T. (2018). Unethical But Not Illegal : Uncovering the Persuasive Messages Leveraged by Providers of the 'Real' Online Social Impressions. In ECIS 2018 : Proceedings of the 26th European Conference on Information Systems, Portsmouth, UK, 23-28 June (Article 172). European Conference on Information Systems. https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2018_rp/172
Lisenssi
In CopyrightOpen Access
Copyright© The Authors, 2018.

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