Participatory Social Media and the Evaluation of Online Behavior

In many online settings, the content that appears on a webpage is created by both website owners and viewers. This study employed the folk model of intentionality to examine how people evaluate collectively created web content. The results indicate that how website owners respond to content posted by others can (1) affect the extent to which they are held accountable for sharing the content and (2) affect the extent to which the content influences viewers' impressions of the website owner. Overall, the findings illustrate the explanatory utility of the folk-model of intentionality in a new context, elucidate new ways in which components of the model interrelate, and highlight the role communication plays in the evaluation of collectively created web content.