THE IMPACTS OF IMAGE MANIPULATION ON CREDIBILITY OF FACEBOOK MESSAGES

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study intended to investigate the impact of photo manipulation which have become popular among young people on credibility of Facebook messages. We had identified the gap in the previous studies which had focused much on the credibility of texts rather than images on the Facebook site. After thorough literature review we identified that there were no previous research done connecting photo manipulation and credibility of those messages when they are uploaded on Facebook in the process of communication. We therefore indulged in this study to establish the impacts of image manipulation on credibility of Facebook messages. In the study, we used 4th year journalism class students as our respondents in Maasai Mara University Main Campus. We had chosen these students to be our respondents since we assumed that they were much aware of image editing and much common Facebook messages consumers and also disseminators. This study used survey as research method and used questionnaires as data collection instruments. The respondents were targeted to answer few questions regarding how they perceived Facebook messages, how often they used Facebook per week, whether they ever did photo manipulation before posting on Facebook and to which common tools they used to do photo manipulation. In this study we assumed all our respondents gave honest information as the study had required. We also assumed our respondents were aware of Facebook communication and about image manipulation