The increasing use of social media and the vast amount of multifaceted content online has led to an increased need to evaluate the trustworthiness of social media content. Every social media user comes across substantial amounts of content published by different entities, and evaluating the trustworthiness of the content is nearly completely the users’ responsibility. The use of social media as a source of information has also notably increased. This creates a problem that is highlighted in the case of young social media users, who are in a more vulnerable position when coming across untrustworthy or misleading content. Young people also use social media more actively compared to older demographics. Thus, it is important to understand, how young people evaluate trustworthiness on social media.

This research aims to discover the types of mechanisms young people use to evaluate trustworthiness on social media, what types of content creators they trust, and how their personal agency impacts trust. The target group of this research are 15-29-year-old Finnish and British social media users. The data used in this research was gathered in 2019 as part of the #Agents project, and it has nearly three thousand replies in total. The data and research methods are both quantitative and qualitative.

The research found a total of fourteen mechanisms that young people use to evaluate trustworthiness on social media. Based on this research it can be said that young people use a variety of mechanisms and possess a lot of knowledge about assessing trustworthiness on social media. On the other hand, the research also showed that many young people are not quite sure how to evaluate trustworthiness on social media. In comparing the trustworthiness of content from different publishing entities, the study shows that young people place the most trust on content created by public authorities, educational institutes, and their friends. The least trustworthy publishers were found to be bloggers, videobloggers, brands and journalists. This research also attempted to establish a relation between trust and young peoples’ personal agency in the context of social media. However, this research did not establish a significant correlation between trust and personal agency.

This thesis sheds light on how young people evaluate trustworthiness on social media, the publishers young people trust on social media, as well as a discussion about how personal agency might impact the trust formation process.