An Empirical Analysis Of Students' Trust To SNSs

Social Networking Sites are new forms of Internet virtual community. The basic difference between SNS and traditional virtual community is that most SNS users disclose their authentic identification information to the site and to the other users of the site. Hence, the credibility of SNS is based on its competency and benevolence of protectiong user's privacy and providing services for online social interaction.Using relevant theores from organization, psychology, sociology, economy and communication research, this paper trie to solve three problems based on the samples of college student users of renren.com. Firstly, a model of trust bases which help the formation of trust is built. Secondly, the relationship between users'initial trust to SNS and their satisfaction to SNS is tested. Thirdly, the relationship between users'trust and their information disclosure behavior is tested.The study results suggest that the users'subsequent trust is positively related to all the trust bases including trust disposition, cognition of institution, cognition of rules, cognition of third-party information and cognition of interaction history with SNS(satisfaction of interaction with SNS). The results also suggest that the users'intitial trust is positively related to their satisfaction of interaction with SNS. Further, the study cannot find evidence of certain relationship between initial trust and users'information disclosure level when they registered. Besides, there is no evidence either to prove the correlation between subsequent trust and users'other information disclosure in the process of using SNS.As a contribution, the"trust base—trust"model is proved to be with reason. The empirical result that there is no relationship between users'trust and their information disclosure behavior also provides new orientations for future research..