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Online Social Networks and Trust

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Abstract

We use Italian data from the Multipurpose Household Survey to explore how participation in social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter affects the most economically relevant aspect of social capital, trust. We account for measures of trust in strangers (often referred to as social trust), trust in neighbours (particularized trust) and trust in the police (institutional trust). We address endogeneity in the use of SNS by exploiting the variation in the availability of broadband for high-speed Internet, which relates to technological characteristics of the pre-existing voice telecommunication infrastructures. We find that all the forms of trust significantly decrease with participation in online networks. We discuss several interpretations of the results in light of the specific features of Internet-mediated social interaction.

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Notes

  1. Both the structural and cognitive dimensions include several sub-dimensions, whose relationships with outcome variables in turn vary according to the context and the effect of other individual and local potentially influential factors (Sabatini 2008; Degli Antoni and Sacconi 2009, 2011; Yamamura 2011). In addition, structural and cognitive dimensions influence each other.

  2. Possible work statuses were: employed, unemployed looking for a job, first job seeker, household, student, disabled worker, retired worker, other.

  3. According to data provided by Facebook Advertising Platform, in January 2008 Facebook had 216,000 subscribers in Italy. As of October 2013, the network officially reports having 26,000,000 subscribers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics and Law, Sapienza University of Rome, Facoltà di Economia, Via del Castro Laurenziano 9, 00161, Rome, Italy

    Fabio Sabatini

  2. Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques du Grand-Duché du Luxembourg (STATEC), LCSR National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation

    Francesco Sarracino

  3. GESIS Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany

    Francesco Sarracino

Authors
  1. Fabio Sabatini
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  2. Francesco Sarracino
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Correspondence to Fabio Sabatini.

Additional information

We are indebted to Angelo Antoci, Ronald F. Inglehart, Eduard Ponarin, Christopher Swader and Christian Welzel for useful comments and suggestions. The paper also benefited from comments by Anna Amalkaeva, Hermann Dülmer, Anna Nemirovskaya, Thomas H. Sander, by participants at the 3rd LCSR International Workshop (Saint Petersburg, 26–30 April 2013), at the conference ‘Cultural and Economic changes under cross-national perspective’ (Moscow, 12–16 November 2013), at the workshop ‘Social and cultural changes in comparative prospect: values and modernization’ (Moscow, 29 March–6 April 2014), at the 2014 Global Economic Symposium (Kuala Lumpur, 9 September 2014), at the workshop ‘Social capital, institutions and economic performance’ (Valencia, 24 October 2014), and at seminars in Latina, Luxembourg City, Milan, and Rome. Usual caveats apply.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Marginal Effects

See Table 10.

Appendix 2: Broadband and Orographic Maps of Italy

See Fig. 6.

Fig. 6
figure 6

Percentage of the population covered by broadband in Italy and topographic map of Italy. Source: Between (2006, p. 17). Darker areas are those with the worst coverage. Green areas have the best coverage. (Color figure online)

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figure a

Appendix 3: IV Estimates

See Tables 11, 12, 13 and 14.

Table 11 SNS use and social trust: IV estimates through CMP
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Table 12 SNS use and trust in strangers measured through the ‘wallet question’: IV estimates with CMP
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Table 13 SNS use and trust in neighbours measured through the ‘wallet question’: IV estimates with CMP
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Table 14 SNS use and trust in the police measured through the ‘wallet question’: IV estimates with CMP
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Sabatini, F., Sarracino, F. Online Social Networks and Trust. Soc Indic Res 142, 229–260 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-1887-2

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