För fri opinionsbildning och rättvisa val : En experimentell studie om effekten av transparensmeddelanden vid politisk reklam

Sammanfattning: Influencers has developed to be our times opinion leaders and social media has become an arena for political information and discussion. In the most recent years they’ve also become an important part of our current political parties' marketing strategies. This has opened up both great opportunities as well as challenges. Within political advertising, there’s unlike commercial advertising, no regulations regarding transparency, which means that influencers have no obligations to label their collaborations with political parties. The distinction has faded between when information is reliable facts or when it’s partial,  biased and based and someone's personal opinion. This has resulted in weakened preconditions for the public to assess and acknowledge reliable sources. The need has increased regarding media competence among citizens in terms of being able to critically review, evaluate and question all the information we encounter. Influencers that spread hidden political advertising is a relatively new phenomenon and has been described as a way for parties to buy political opinions for money, as influencers can be considered to use their trust capital to influence its audience. The experiment in this study is based on theories of credibility and critical thinking, and aims to investigate how young adults perceive political messages in collaborations with influencers depending on the degree of transparency in the media content. The same base  material will be shown in three different experimental groups, but the degree of transparency will vary. In the first experimental group it will not appear at all that it is a collaboration, in the second group it will be only say it is a collaboration and in the third group it will be clearly stated that it is a paid collaboration between a political party and an influencer and that the collaboration is a part of the political parties PR-campaign for the upcoming election. The essay's questions are: To what extent is it possible to discern a connection between the degree of transparency and the credibility of the collaboration? To what extent is it possible to discern a connection between the degree of transparency and the audience's critical thinking? And lastly to what extent does political leaning have an impact on the results of the study? The results of the study shows that an increased transparency on political social media content also increases media users' critical approach. The result of the study could not determine whether or not there is a strong correlation between transparency and the credibility of the content. The study did show strong correlations between political leaning and the answers of the respondents.