Rebuilding Trust in a Fragmented Digital World
Philosophy can be the framework
This week, BBC Director General Tim Davie warned that the UK is facing a “trust crisis” due to the spread of disinformation on social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok. He emphasized the BBC’s role in combating this erosion of shared facts and the growing societal polarization.
The decline in trust isn’t limited to the UK. A recent Pew Research Center study found that Americans’ trust in each other has dropped dramatically. In 1972, 46% of adults said “most people can be trusted.” By 2018, that number had fallen to just 34%.
In my own work, I’ve argued that understanding untrustworthiness is just as important as understanding trust itself. In my paper “Untrustworthiness,” I look at what it means for someone (or something) to be untrustworthy in the first place. You’re very welcome to check that out if you fancy wading through a philosophy paper! But the general focus of the paper is on showing that we need to carefully differentiate the concept of trustworthiness and its opposite (‘distrustworthiness’?) from something in between—the lack of both turns out to be quite important.
The current media landscape, with its overwhelming mix of good information, bad information, and outright noise, makes it harder than ever to figure out who or what to trust and who or what deserves our trust. That confusion breeds suspicion. And suspicion, over time, wears down our willingness to engage, to believe, and to act together. If I was going to suggest that there’s an obvious take away from my paper it’s that just because something isn’t trustworthy, doesn’t mean we need to be all that suspicious. There’s an important and entirely reasonable middle ground in which we neither trust nor distrust someone. We need to recognise that more rather than moving to the extremes in how we evaluate whether others deserve our trust.
Of course, this is of a piece with the idea that we need to be more deliberate about how we build trust back. Institutions like the BBC can help, especially if they remain transparent, accountable, and consistent. Individuals, too, have a role to play. We can choose to slow down, check our sources, and be thoughtful about what we share.
That’s where philosophy can offer something useful. Not answers, exactly, but a framework for thinking. If we understand the conditions under which trust grows — things like vulnerability, expectation, and goodwill — we can begin to make better decisions about how to rebuild it, both personally and collectively.
The trust crisis may be real, but it’s not irreversible, and we don’t need to jump to the extremes. With a bit of care and thought, we can start to put the pieces back together.