Trust module 1: Why believe disinformation? You can’t trust anyone else
By Julian | Last Updated: 20 January 2025
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“It is projected that the world’s GDP will grow by 3.2% next year”
If you read this, you should have questions. Who wrote this? How exactly is it that they claim to know what will happen in the future?
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Your belief in the claim is informed by how much you believe the source. If I said this quote was from my neighbor who watches birds all day versus a top tier financial firm, your level of belief would be different.
This same phenomenon is why disinformation is a problem in the first place. It’s not that we lack facts but rather that we lack trust in who is providing these “facts”.
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Trust no one
The media, the government and other institutions are not believed because they are not trusted. Around the world in high income democracies there has been a uniform decrease in trust in the media, the government, and the quality of democracy.
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Trust in government is lowest for those who lack a political voice or have a sense of financial insecurity This makes sense for two reasons:
1: We’ve observed a decrease in trust at the same time we’ve seen an increase in inequality and therefore more people with financial insecurity.
2: Over the time period since the 1970s where we’ve seen a growth in distrust in democracy. People are seeing that democratic institutions by and large are not as representative as they should be given how technology has expedited so many other aspects of our lives.
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We forget that making voting accessible to people has been a fight for hundred of years. In the US Once only wealthy white landowners could vote. Now everyone can vote but our current technologies could allow for far greater representation than we are currently afforded. Most people are painfully aware of this.
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The answer to disinformation is not to shove more facts at people but rather to give people an incentive to want to believe in the system. We need to give people agency. In Taiwan they developed an ingenious solution.
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