Stepinska and Hopmann 2016). These developments and the lack of-up-to-date evidence in the literature led me to the following research question: What determines the individual perception of public opinion? The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. After some remarks concerning the definition of the term public opinion, I will discuss single influential works for the field in general and, briefly, the literature of the past two decades examining the specific micro-level relationship. As the paper aims to examine current implications, a focus lies on the effects of aggregated user opinion representations and comments on SNS embedded in the frameworks of the spiral of silence (Noelle-Neumann 1974, 1977, 1993), social projection (Fields and Schuman 1976) and the persuasive press inference (Gunther 1998).