Audience Media Trust in the Online Context

This study aims to investigate how audience media trust is influenced by inductive knowledge and channel belief within the context of online discourse. A theoretical model was developed, incorporating split virtual personality, symbolic sign system, discontinuous expert system, and disembedding time-space separation as independent variables, with audience media trust as the dependent variable, and weak inductive knowledge and weak channel belief as mediators. Data were gathered via a questionnaire survey and analyzed using structural equation modeling. Key findings include: (1) Split virtual personality, symbolic sign system, discontinuous expert system, and disembedding time-space separation negatively impact audience media trust through the mediators of weak inductive knowledge and weak channel belief. (2) The variables' impact on media trust is ranked as follows: split virtual personality, discontinuous expert system, symbolic sign system, and disembedding time-space separation. Weak channel belief has a greater impact on media trust than weak inductive knowledge. (3) Weak inductive knowledge and weak channel belief serve as partial mediators, with the total mediating effect of inductive knowledge surpassing that of weak channel belief. (4) For split virtual personality and discontinuous expert system, weak channel belief mediates more significantly than weak inductive knowledge, whereas for symbolic sign system and disembedding time-space separation, weak inductive knowledge mediates more significantly than weak channel belief. These findings are analyzed and discussed, highlighting the study's value and future research directions.