On Institutional Trust and Fake News
Because I’ll be damned if I’m going to write out a 15 tweet storm of incoherence and difficult to follow sentence fragments. Get a tumblr, people. 2016 has been horrible but the post election Tweetstorms might be the worst thing yet.
Anyways, I’ll start here:
While this is a UK centered graph and I’m assuming US culture is similar enough for the results to be largely similar, the central takeaway is that one is more likely to believe their hairdresser or barber than a writer in the New Yorker. This is not a surprisingly difficult thing to believe when they’re busy writing things like this:
Just absurd.
Anyways, there’s a clear line of trust that from even a cursory glance correlates to face time, the “locality” of that individual, and the impact of their work. And it likely explains the reaction to several national stories present in culture. One could even predict “the side” the public will take in any interaction by comparing the trust levels of the actors in the conflict. It is probably one of many reasons it is not surprising that the flood of think pieces in our national journalistic community has not been able to quench the conflagration of police brutality, especially in regards to minorities, in our country.
It can also explain the effectiveness of social networks and the spread of fake news. If our hairdresser or doctor is on facebook sharing the latest personal anecdote on a topic, their message is operating from a strong position of trust to begin with since:
- The message is shared by a trusted actor due to being in your network
- Our previous trustworthy experiences with that actor incline us to trust them again
- We tend to trust domain experts (you curled my hair beautifully/cured my illness/fixed by back that one time, so why wouldn’t you be right about this too) in other domains, even if it doesn't make sense to do so all the time
One thing to note, this trust may not include family members, since we've seen them in enough contexts to know how full of shit they are.
This all contributes to the spread of information that can be hard to dispute with traditional news institutions since they’re trusted less and we have also seen them wrong or inaccurate in enough contexts to distrust future work. Our networks are insular and information we’re alerted to inside them are already privileged over outside information, even if that outside information would agree with us.
The fight against fake news isn’t to fight the fakeness from outside their distribution network, but to get the “real news” inside the trusted network.
Easier said than done. I’m glad I’m in technology.
