Highlights from Medium’s “Trust Issues”
From Medium’s monthly magazine, thoughts on decline of trust and what to do about it
Editor’s note: Throughout the month of June 2018, Medium published original articles on the theme of trust in the premiere issue of its new digital magazine. Many of the pieces are relevant to the themes of trust in society that are being explored by the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy. Here’s a quick glance. — Nancy Watzman
Political philosopher Kevin Vallier, wrote on how there’s “room for optimism despite the widely known fact that trust in both society and government is declining in the United States.” Vallier argues that there’s evidence that if we pursue fairness, fight discrimination and segregation, reduce corruption and protect rule of law, trust in society and the political system will increase. Vallier’s piece is adapted from a white paper commissioned by the Knight Foundation as part of the work of the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy.
nancy gibbs wrote about what the media needs to do to regain trust: “[E]ven before the President declared the press the “enemy of the people,” changes in the sources and funding and flow of news made it harder for reporters and editors to do their jobs…[W]e need to keep the lights burning and expose abuse wherever we find it, but we should also be mindful that good news also counts as news, solutions that work need to be celebrated and shared, and politics, unlike sports, works better without a scoreboard.”
Claire Zulkey interviewed journalism and media professors on why the media still matters.
danah boyd wrote on why her faith in journalism is waning–with ideas of how to make things better: “Journalism can only function as the fourth estate when it serves as a tool to voice the concerns of the people and to inform those people of the issues that matter…. It’s easier to trust an institution when it has a human face that you know and respect. And as fewer and fewer people know journalists, they trust the institution less and less.”
Francesca Tripodi explained her research on how Trump voters decide who to trust: “While conservatives have been taught to dig in and “unpack” the meaning in original sources, many of them are unaware that the sources Google provides are a product of what they search — and how they search, and sometimes Google results are inaccurate. In a time where everyone is taught to be critical of the media, people searching for truth see Google as weighting facts, not just ranking results. This is true on both sides of the aisle.” Read more from Tripodi on Trust, Media and Democracy here.
Bryan Walsh interviewed Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon papers, on government secrecy, likes, and why he decided to do what he did.
Sarah Begley interviewed the philosopher Martha Nussbaum on the importance of maintaining hope: “At such a time it is easy to pull back from reciprocity and embrace fear. But I argue that the same conditions can also be met with hope, and a determination to join with others to solve the problems. In fact, I think we owe it to ourselves and to others to cultivate hope in ourselves since hope is needed to sustain our efforts on behalf of our nation.”
Ian Bremmer wrote on how the decline of trust is systemic, and why democracy is still the best system of government, despite its flaws: It’s easy to blame the current president for the loss of trust, but Donald Trump is a symptom rather than a source of this illness…This loss of trust in democracy, not just in the U.S. but across Europe, has multiple causes: changes in technology and the proliferation of ideas and information, inequality exacerbated by globalization, and opportunistic politicians that see political gain in deepening divisions within and among countries chief among them.”
Evan Selinger wrote about how Facebook manufactures intimacy when it is anything but: “Facebook conjures together the spell of personalization from many things, ranging from likes and interests to personality quirks and political leanings. This is a central strategy for engineering our trust. Concerns about filter bubbles and the difficulty of determining reliable from unreliable news sources exist in part because our experience of Facebook is designed to make us trust the “personal” space we’re in and therefore open to sharing with extended friends.”
Woodrow Hartzog wrote on how user agreements proffered by tech companies erode trust: “These agreements aren’t designed in a way that would allow us to properly consider the risks we’re taking. Tech companies have no incentive to change them. Lawmakers don’t seem to know what the alternatives are. But that doesn’t change the reality: User agreements are a legal and ethical trap, and they betray the trust of users from the very start.”
From Baratunde Thurston, tips on how to do assessments on what social media platforms know about you: “As much as this data-detox business sounds laborious, it’s important. Consider it a form of hygiene akin to your annual household spring cleanings and your daily showers.”
Also from Baratunde Thurston, a manifesto on what tech companies should do to help earn our trust: “Since companies value us collectively, we must restore balance with a collective response that is based on the view that we’re in this together — that our rights and responsibilities are shared.”
From Aaron Gell, an exploration of mobile voting companies pitching blockchain as a solution to ensure election integrity–and why experts contend that it would fall far short of that: “A blockchain is only as valuable as the data stored on it. And whereas traditional paper ballots preserve an indelible record of the actual intent of each voter, digital votes “don’t produce an original hard-copy record of any kind,” Jefferson says. “So the county has no meaningful way of verifying that these ballots truly represent what voters intended. It’s all evanescent. It’s electrons all the way down, and the blockchain can’t fix that.”
Manoush Zomorodi presented a more warm and fuzzy view of blockchain technology, and explains how Civil is experimenting with using it build trust in journalism: “To the average reader, Civil will look like any other reputable news website. On the back end, however, articles will be archived on the blockchain so no publisher could ever remove them. It will also have its own token economy in which consumers can participate, giving them the opportunity to help decide how this news platform is run and enforce strict journalistic standards. Civil tokens will, in theory, end the need for clickbait headlines that can lead to fake news and shoddy reporting.” (Civil is giving start up funding to the Colorado Sun, a Denver start up employing several former Denver Post reporters.)
Gleb Tsipursky wrote on the decline of trust in science: “This crumbling of trust in science and academia forms part of a broader pattern, what Tom Nichols called the death of expertise in his 2017 book of the same name. Growing numbers of people claim their personal opinions hold equal weight to the opinions of experts.”
