Social Media's Information Impact: A Research Proposal for BUSN20016

This research proposal explores the multifaceted impact of social media on information dissemination. It begins by defining the problem: the rapid spread of both accurate and misleading information on social media platforms. The research aims to determine whether social media primarily spreads awareness and knowledge or contributes to public confusion and misinformation. The methodology involves a literature review and the use of secondary data sources, such as journals, books, and articles. Data presentation will be textual, and content analysis will be employed to analyze the gathered data and draw conclusions. The proposal highlights the prevalence of fake news and emphasizes the importance of verifying information from reliable sources. The study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of social media's role in shaping public perception and knowledge.

Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA
2020
Social Media Information
Research Proposal

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Table of Contents
Problem Statement.....................................................................................................................2
Research Aim and Objective..................................................................................................3
Brief Methodology.................................................................................................................3
Secondary data sources, data presentation, and data analysis methods.................................3
References..................................................................................................................................5

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Problem Statement
Social media is a platform that helps people to share, create, and provide their opinion
or to take part in social networking. Today, social media has become one of the highly used
platforms for sharing information for the general public, businesses, as well as government
(Albarran, 2013). The information shared on the social media platform is spread quickly. The
promotion of effective and useful information on social media has supported in motivating
and encouraging people to focus on sensitive topics. For example, the information sharing
related to environmental safety has always supported people in understanding the information
about environmental safety and ways to save it (Kaur & Chahal, 2018). Besides this, the
social media platform is the one through which people share information related to different
social issues that increase the knowledge of people and take a step to speak against the wrong
attitude of people. Furthermore, social media has supported a number of businesses in
operating their functions such as wellness and fitness business, fashion industry, etc. by
sharing their real-time videos and photos to motivate people to live a fit and stylish life.
However, there is a number of ways that are being used to share false and misguiding
information on social media. It has been observed that fake news is everywhere. Lies spread
faster like wildfire on the social media platform, it is getting faster and longer-lasting pickup
in comparison to truth. As per the analysis, it has been identified that on Twitter false news
has been re-tweeted more in comparison to true information. Therefore, before believing in
any of the news provided on the social media platform by any unreliable sources, it is
important to check it. As per the news article presented by NBC News, some applications are
used or checking the fact that it is factcheck.org, politifact.com, truthorfiction.com,
haoxslayer.com, etc. (Fox, 2018). Besides this, in order to identify the facts behind an
information piece, the reader must not just believe in the information but they should

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reconfirm it from some of the authentic sites like news channels, publishers, journals, books,
etc.
Research Aim and Objective
Aim of this paper is to understand whether the information of social media spread
awareness and knowledge or misled/confuse the general public. In order to meet this aim,
some small objectives have been designed that are discussed below:
 To comprehend the notion of social media.
 To understand the social media information is beneficial to increase
knowledge or mislead the reader.
Brief Methodology
In order to get the detailed information related to social media and to understand
whether it spread information and knowledge or mislead/confuse to the general public, it is
very important to select the appropriate methods and approaches in methodology section.
Research strategy is one of the important parts of the methodology as it helps in
guiding a route to meet the objective of the paper. In order to get a proper route for meeting
the aim of this paper, the use of literature review will be done as the research strategy.
Literature review is a survey that is conducted of the scholarly sources like journals, books,
theses, etc. about a particular topic or research problem (Efron and Ravid, 2018). In addition
to this, to gather the data for the research the use of secondary method of data collection will
be used as it will help in identifying the findings of published articles and books related to the
topic.
Secondary data sources, data presentation, and data analysis methods
The secondary data sources are the sources that provide information that have been
already published related to the research problem (Aurini, Heath & Howells, 2016). The
secondary data sources that will be used for conducting this research are journals, books,

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website, articles, theses, etc. All these sources that will be used are authentic and provide
reliable information for the topic.
Data presentation is the way by which data or information is presented in the paper or
thesis. There are two types of presentation one is the use of graphs, charts, and tables for
presenting the statistical data such that logical conclusion can be made. Besides this, there is
a textual presentation under which data is presented into paragraphs (Hoffmann, 2017).
Considering the topic of this paper, the use of textual presentation will be done.
Data analysis is all about analyzing the data by the use of different methods in order
to get proper conclusion for the paper. In this paper, the use of content analysis method will
be used in order to identify the pattern into the gathered data and present reliable conclusion.

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References
Albarran, B.A. (2013). The Social Media Industries 1st ed. U.S: Routledge.
Aurini, D.J., Heath, M., & Howells, S. (2016). The How To of Qualitative Research:
Strategies for Executing High Quality Projects 1st ed. U.K: SAGE.
Efron, E.S., and Ravid, R. (2018). Writing the Literature Review 1st ed. U.S: Guilford
Publications.
Fox, M. (2018, March 9). Fake News: Lies spread faster on social media than truth does.
NBC News. Retrieved from
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fake-news-lies-spread-faster-
social-media-truth-does-n854896
Hoffmann, P.J. (2017). Principles of Data Management and Presentation 1st ed. U.S: Univ of
California Press.
Kaur, A., & Chahal, S.H. (2018). Role of Social Media in increasing Environmental issue
Awareness. Journal of Arts, Science & Commerce, 9(1), 19-24.