  Passive consumption of a quantifiable amount of social media information
related to a topic can cause individuals to form opinions. If a substantial
amount of these individuals are motivated to take action from their recently
established opinions, a movement or public opinion shift can be induced
independent of the information's veracity. Given that social media is
ubiquitous in modern society, it is imperative that we understand the threshold
at which social media data results in opinion formation. The present study
estimates population opinion formation thresholds by querying 2222 participants
about the number of various social media data-types (i.e., images, videos,
and/or messages) that they would need to passively consume to form opinions.
Opinion formation is assessed across three dimensions, 1) data-type(s), 2)
context, and 3) source. This work provides a theoretical basis for estimating
the amount of data needed to influence a population through social media
information.
