Don’t trust strangers on the internet. 

McMaster graduate Kevin Floether has received a prestigious international award for his work exploring the classic advice dating back to the early days of the internet.  

Faced with algorithms that reward controversy and are flooded by clickbait, spam, bots, AI-generated content, sponsored posts and paid influencers, it can be hard to know who to trust, says Floether, who graduated this year from the Master of Communications Management (MCM) program. 

His work on influencers and their impact on their followers’ buying decisions was recognized by the Institute of Public Relations with the Grossman Group Master’s Thesis of the Year Award, an international honour celebrating graduate research with applications for public relations and communications. 

How trust is built and manipulated online 

Floether’s research looked at influencers who review technology products, shaping the buying decisions of millions of followers.  

“Trust is one of the most fundamental things we have in our society, and advanced societies simply can’t exist sustainably without it,” Floether says.  

“I focused on three dimensions of trust: integrity, dependability and competence. Does the influencer seem honest and fair? Do they follow through consistently? Do they actually know what they’re talking about?”  

To test this, he scraped YouTube video transcripts of influencer product reviews, as well as product reviews from consumers on Amazon, then used natural language processing tools to compare them.  

Floether also analyzed thousands of YouTube comments and Google News articles to see how consumers and media outlets described influencers’ credibility. 

He found that influencers with smaller followings demonstrated stronger connections between audience trust and authentic content.  

When audiences used keywords related to integrity, dependability and competence to describe these creators, their reviews were more likely to closely match genuine consumer experiences on Amazon.  

This suggests that having a smaller following helps influencers build authentic relationships with their audiences, leading to content that genuinely reflects what everyday consumers think about products. 

Influencers with tens of millions of followers, however, sometimes made questionable claims about sponsored products that did not match consumer reviews, but still maintained credibility with their audience.  

“The research suggests they’ve built a community that cares less about the technical accuracy of the product or of the review, instead valuing the parasocial relationship that has formed between the reviewer and themselves,” Floether explains. 

He also found that being involved in controversy sometimes helped influencers appear more trustworthy.  

“This was a counterintuitive finding,” explains Floether. “But what it suggests, at least to me, is that controversies raise visibility without always harming trust and could potentially act as an opportunity to build trust instead, if dealt with in a transparent and authentic manner.” 

Implications for online messaging 

Even though he filtered for meaningful comments and reviews in the analysis, there was no reliable way to know which ones were organic or human, Floether warned.  

“The problem is massive, affecting trust in all digital communication,” Floether says.  

“More and more of the content that we see online has a possibility of being fake. Are we going to develop a way of verifying what’s true, or who’s real, on online platforms?”  

This research is a small, small step towards that solution, Floether says. “It shows that we can actually take tools that already exist and apply them to the problem.” 

This issue is more relevant than ever as people are relying more on independent news sources and alternative media, including influencers, for information. 

His findings have implications for fields like public health, where trust is critical to how a message is received.  

In Canada, for example, the federal government has been leveraging the unique reach that influencers have to share public health messaging on issues like opioid misuse, but this messaging faces the same challenges that undermine trust in other digital communications. 

The erosion of digital trust is emphasizing the growing value of in-person experiences in all communications, Floether says.  

Brands are using experiential marketing campaigns, for example, to build credibility and loyalty through face to face interactions. These are often more effective than digital campaigns. 

“People process the world through all their senses,” Floether says. “The more senses that you can engage, the bigger the emotional reaction and the more likely you are to recall that brand in the future. When you’re online, it’s one, maybe two of them, right? But in person, you’re engaging them all.” 

Applying research to practice 

Floether joins a growing list of McMaster MCM graduates who have earned the Institute of Public Relations’ Master’s Thesis of the Year Award.

2019 graduate Martin Waxman, who, like Floether, was supervised by Communication studies and communication management professor Alex Sévigny, received the award for his research on human relationships with AI. 

“To be recognized by a research-driven organization like this means the world to me,” says Floether. “It’s also a testament to the MCM program’s ability to train communications leaders. It offers you a set of skills you can’t find anywhere else.” 

Floether is keeping busy after graduation as the director of Marketing and Communications at Chartered Business Valuators Institute, serving on the Canadian Marketing Association’s AI committee, and pursuing an Accredited in Public Relations (APR) designation from the Canadian Public Relations Society.

He’s also presenting his work at international conferences for research in public relations, and a PhD might be in the future, he says, applying his research methods to other platforms and industries. 

“None of this would be possible without this program. It gave me the skills, the confidence, and the connections to be able to make it happen.”