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The hidden impact of hashtags on Instagram: navigational heuristics on source trustworthiness

Han Ye et al.

International Journal of Web Based Communities2025https://doi.org/10.1504/ijwbc.2025.145135article
ABDC C
Weight
0.37

What the paper says

Hashtags are popular navigability tools in a social media-driven environment. However, social media users have purposely employed a hashtag stuffing strategy, where many unrelated hashtags are added to a post to increase the visibility of the post and drive viewership. The results of the current study suggest a potential negative impact of hashtags on source trustworthiness assessment made by Instagram users through heuristic processing. This research conducted two experimental studies with samples from the overall Instagram population. Study 1 (N = 174) was a 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial experiment designed to demonstrate the positive effects of hashtags' navigability cues on Instagram users' perceived source trustworthiness. Study 2 (N = 185) was a 2 × 2 × 2 experiment that aimed to examine the interactive effect between the visual stimuli of a post and the heuristic cues of hashtags. The current research challenges some of the widely accepted hashtag strategies and provides several practical hashtag usage implications for social media influencers and companies.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1504/ijwbc.2025.145135

Or copy a formatted citation

@article{han2025,
  title        = {{The hidden impact of hashtags on Instagram: navigational heuristics on source trustworthiness}},
  author       = {Han Ye et al.},
  journal      = {International Journal of Web Based Communities},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1504/ijwbc.2025.145135},
}

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Evidence weight

0.37

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.16 × 0.4 = 0.06
M · momentum0.53 × 0.15 = 0.08
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.