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<p>As social media has changed into a binary social-commercial ecosystem, followers evaluate their social media influencers in two ways when making decisions: as friends and as marketers. Previous literature on influencers tends to evaluate trust as an overall assessment of the trusting party, so they have not considered the different roles they may play on social media. Instead, this study develops a dual-role trust model for exploring trust mechanisms within multiple roles. More importantly, previous literature has also indicated that the dual-edged impact of perceived friendship on the trust mechanism has been largely disregarded in the context of SMIs. To fill this gap, this study further investigates whether perceived friendship has paradoxical positive and negative moderating effects in the dual-role trust mechanism. Data were examined using Partial Least Square – Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) and SmartPLS software to test the proposed hypothesis. The results confirm trust transfer between dual roles and both complementary and substitute effects of perceived friendship in a dual role-based trust mechanism. Our results indicate that platform designers should distinguish between systems and settings to facilitate the coexistence of different roles. Influencers trace the relationship data and classify followers at different levels to facilitate the appropriate interactions.</p>

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The Paradox of Friendship as a Dual-role Trust Model for Social Media Influencers

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年3月31日

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  • Shang Chen,
  • Qingfei Min,
  • Xuefei Xu,
  • Lin Liu

摘要

As social media has changed into a binary social-commercial ecosystem, followers evaluate their social media influencers in two ways when making decisions: as friends and as marketers. Previous literature on influencers tends to evaluate trust as an overall assessment of the trusting party, so they have not considered the different roles they may play on social media. Instead, this study develops a dual-role trust model for exploring trust mechanisms within multiple roles. More importantly, previous literature has also indicated that the dual-edged impact of perceived friendship on the trust mechanism has been largely disregarded in the context of SMIs. To fill this gap, this study further investigates whether perceived friendship has paradoxical positive and negative moderating effects in the dual-role trust mechanism. Data were examined using Partial Least Square – Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) and SmartPLS software to test the proposed hypothesis. The results confirm trust transfer between dual roles and both complementary and substitute effects of perceived friendship in a dual role-based trust mechanism. Our results indicate that platform designers should distinguish between systems and settings to facilitate the coexistence of different roles. Influencers trace the relationship data and classify followers at different levels to facilitate the appropriate interactions.