An Empirical Study of Factors Influencing Internet credibility ??? Based on the Survey of Media Usage Habits from 36 cities in China

China had more than 649 million Internet users so far. With the popularization of the Internet, the trust mechanism of the traditional society has been impacted, and the trust mechanism of the network society has been forming. In order to evaluate the Internet credibility, we measured the credibility of information on the Internet from a perspective way. According to the results of a nationwide telephone survey on the sample of 1080 Chinese residents from 36 cities conducted by the Social Survey Center in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, we found that the Internet credibility in China is not very high. 51.5% of the respondents said they don???t believe the information on the Internet but not on traditional media, such as newspaper and television, while only 17.9% of the respondents believe such information, and the rest of them remain neutral. We further proposed a Hierarchical Linear Regression Model to present the influence of the demographic factors, personality, media using habits, obedience to authority and trust in government on Chinese residents??? perception of Internet credibility. Results showed that (1) perception of Internet credibility differed among respondents in relation to age and education; (2) there is a positive and significant relationship between media use, media dependency and perception of Internet credibility; (3) both of obedience to authority and trust in government have a negative effect on the perception of Internet credibility; (4) personality is also an important influencing factor. Our study found that people who do not tell their troubles to anyone have a lower level of perception of Internet credibility.