Collapse of Trust
The Collapse of Public Trust
"You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible." Anton Chekhov.
Trust has three basic functions in people's lives: it makes social life predictable, it creates a sense of community, and it makes it easier for people to cooperate and work with one another.[1] It is the glue that holds society together — or as Confucius said, "Without trust we cannot stand."[2]  And trust is one of the main casualties of fake news.
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1   Life Without Trust
It is difficult to imagine what life would be like without trust: we trust water companies to deliver potable water to our taps; we trust supermarkets to deliver fresh and wholesome food; we trust banks to look after our money; and we trust the police and our legal system to look after our safety and dispense justice. Fake news and misinformation can and does undermine our faith in all of the above.

The recent rise in fake news has been matched by a steep decline in public trust — and especially trust in authority and the mainstream media. We can only speculate on exactly how these things are related, but what is clear is that without trust in our politicians, and those running our public institutions and the media, anxiety and insecurity will prevail, and social cohesion will evaporate.

2   Trust Barometer
Every year Edelman publishes a ‘Trust Barometer’ based on the result of thousands of interviews in many countries around the world. The 2017 survey (published in Jan. 2018) covers over 33,000 people across 28 countries. Edelman finds “the world in a new phase in the loss of trust: the unwillingness to believe information, even from those closest to us.
The loss of confidence in information channels and sources,” it says, “is the fourth wave of the trust tsunami [after ‘globalization & automation’; ‘the Great Recession’, and ‘the effects of massive global migration’]… We now have a world without common facts and objective truth, weakening trust even as the global economy recovers. [This] is perhaps the most insidious because it undermines the very essence of rational discourse and decision-making.”
Trust in institutions has "evaporated to such an extent that falsehood can be misconstrued as fact, strength as intelligence, and self-interest as social compact.” The report described the situation as “a slow-motion meltdown, an angry delayed recognition of permanent decline in economic and social status by those who have not kept pace with globalization and dramatic technological change… trust is now the deciding factor in whether a society can function." There is a lack of belief in leaders (who damage the stature of their institutions); a demise of government as an effective force in leading change; and the media… distrusted in more than 80% of the countries surveyed to a “level near government” (about 40%). Media is now seen as "politicized, unable to meet its reporting obligations due to economic pressures, and following social media rather than creating the agenda." It's a truly bleak picture.[3]

The graph below is one of many in the 2018 report: it shows how, in a number of western countries, public trust has significantly declined over the last year, in contrast to the reverse trend in countries like China, Turkey and Russia (where there is little or no free speech).[4] The graph above is from the 2017 report.

3   Political Legitimacy Undermined
“If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters.”
Harvey Mackay
The decline in public trust in the mainstream media in Britain is analysed by Andrew Harrison in an excellent article in The Guardian, and one of the luminaries he quotes is Rasmus Nielsen of the Reuters Institute.  Nielsen opines that: “The political legitimacy of institutions like the BBC and also the business models of newspapers depend on the idea that they offer something trustworthy. Healthy distrust can be a good thing but hardened cynicism is paralysing.” Nielsen is “worried that people are tending to judge the entire industry by its worst practitioners.” Fake news, he says, allows established media like The Guardian to “market itself as an antidote to deliberate untruth,” but “this obscures the more dangerous story – which is that much of the public has very low confidence in the ‘non-fake’ work of professional journalists.” Indeed, Harrison notes that the term ‘mainstream media’ has now become a term of abuse, and he bemoans the nightmare prospect of “news and commentary devolving into a baseless cacophony where anyone can say anything and whatever is shared most will win" and that "the truth will become what the most, or the loudest, people want it to be.”[5]
Social Media Discredited
Edelman finds that (in 2017) “social media companies have lost the trust of most of the public, with only a quarter of the UK population now saying that they trust social media as a source for news and information. Where social media companies were once seen as champions of free speech and democracy, they are now seen as not taking enough responsibility for key issues including extremism, fake news, and cyberbullying.” The fact that it is so simple to manipulate the signals of trust on social media, makes automated bots and fake accounts powerful tools in directing or subverting political discourse.[6] In March 2018 Twitter issued a statement in which it admitted that since June 2017 it had “been able to detect an average of 130,000 accounts per day who are attempting to manipulate trends." [7]  Facebook has estimated that there may be as many as 60 million fake accounts on its system. These revelations are discrediting social media platforms.
4   Why Trust is Important
“Liberty is the right not to lie.”   Albert Camus
Fraud, fakery and lies undermines the basic tenets of civil society, which relies on mutual trust. You can find a philosophical justification for this in ‘Truth and Truthfulness’ by the late Bernard Williams, who argued passionately that people can’t get along without trust, and that for human flourishing we need to cooperate. Trust in turn requires truthfulness, and truthfulness presupposes that there are at least some truths.
In recent years there has been a catastrophic collapse in trust in government and mainstream institutions, business, the media and NGOs. I have explored this disturbing development on a separate page. Of course, one hard truth that we sadly have to live with is that many people do not understand or believe many basic ‘facts’, such as evolution, preferring to believe things that are unproven or unprovable — and all too often, ideas that are demonstrably untrue.[8] This problem of 'deeper emotional truths' can only be tackled (I believe) through secular education, and education from an early age.
What we don't understand about trust
Philosopher Baroness O'Neill is interested in the role of trust in public life. Here she challenges us to think more clearly about what we actually mean when we say trust is on the decline, and we need to rebuild it.

Watch the video [Sep 2013; 9:40 mins] and or read a short explanation.
5   Democracy & Truth
“This business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time.”                                                                 George Orwell
Clearly fake news is not a new phenomenon, but it has become a real problem with the development of computing power and IT, and the extraordinary rise of social media. Some educationalists argue that the foundation for much of today's fake news can be laid at the door of fake history.
It is important to recognise that in a democracy there is freedom of speech. But freedom of speech does not give people the freedom to lie. Democracy requires informed consent — or put another way, self-government by the people requires an informed and knowledgeable electorate. This condition requires, in turn, that there are not constraints on the free flow of information and ideas because this is the means by which a free society translates political advocacy into concrete political action. [9]
As Sophia Rosenfeld points our in 'Democracy & Truth' there’s a tension at the heart of democracy between "the supposed wisdom of the crowd and the need for information to be vetted and evaluated by a learned elite of trusted experts."
“‘Fake news,’ wild conspiracy theories, misleading claims, doctored photos, lies peddled as facts, facts dismissed as lies  — citizens of democracies increasingly inhabit a public sphere teeming with competing claims and counterclaims, with no institution or person possessing the authority to settle basic disputes in a definitive way.”

What we are witnessing today is the unravelling of the détente between these competing aspects of democratic culture. And some of this false information is coming from hostile powers intent on causing harm...
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Notes
1    Barbara Misztal [1996]: ‘Trust in Modern Societies: The Search for the Bases of Social Order’ (Polity Press).
2    Check out the 2002 Reith Lectures by Baroness O’Neill entitled ‘A Question of Trust’. Here is O'Neill's opening paragraph: "Confucius told his disciple Tsze-kung that three things are needed for government: weapons, food and trust. If a ruler can't hold on to all three, he should give up the weapons first and the food next. Trust should be guarded to the end: "without trust we cannot stand." You might also like to consult the work of the late philosopher Bernard Williams, who in ‘Truth and Truthfulness’ writes passionately about how people cannot get along without trust, and that for human flourishing we need to cooperate. [For an excellent review of William's book see Clancy Martin.]
3    Edelman’s analysis in 2017 was equally chilling: it characterised 2016 as “a year of unimaginable upheaval. The incumbent party or elected head of state in five of the top 10 global economies (Brazil, Italy, South Korea, UK, US) has been deposed or defeated. Populist candidates are leading or growing in strength in upcoming elections in France and Germany. The UK voted to exit the European Union. There have been violent terrorist acts in Belgium, France, Germany, and the US, plus the never-ending tragedy in Syria. Bribery has been exposed at some of Brazil’s leading companies, with CEOs sent to jail. An American unicorn health diagnostics start-up with a sterling board of directors and huge private financing was found to have falsified its clinical trials. The release of the Panama Papers proved tax evasion on a global scale by business moguls and superstar athletes alike" and "the mainstream media lost audience as its advertising melted away and it confronted the spectre of fake news.” Trust in institutions had "evaporated to such an extent that falsehood can be misconstrued as fact, strength as intelligence, and self-interest as social compact… The lack of societal and institutional safeguards provides fertile ground for populist movements fueled by fear. Corruption and globalization are the top two issues for the general population, with two-thirds of the public concerned and nearly a third deeply worried about these economic factors. But there also is a deep unease about issues related to personal safety or family life, including erosion of social values, immigration and rapid pace of change.”

4    For the graph, Edelman has normalised the survey results over the four main sectors of government, business, the mainstream media and civil society/NGOs. We have added the rings.

5    In practice, truth is a rather difficult, perplexing and elusive concept. Oscar Wilde famously observed that “the truth is rarely pure and never simple", indeed, truth is often perplexing, inconvenient and unpalatable. Albert Einstein advised that if you are out to describe the truth “leave elegance to the tailor;” and André Gide counselled people to "believe those who are seeking the truth” but “doubt those who find it."[For a layperson's examination of Truth see here.]

6    Some bots not only post content independently but interact with real users. They can shift the focus and amplify messages at a much larger scale than would otherwise be possible if real people were broadcasting the message. Chatbots operate 24 / 7: they are constantly accumulating knowledge and become smarter and more flexible after every customer conversation.

7    Twitter’s admission came in response to a BBC investigation which found that companies in Saudi Arabia were offering to artificially boost the popularity of hashtags to make them trend on Twitter (which is in contravention of the social media network's rules). The price to get automated bot accounts to make a hashtag trend for a few hours is around £150.

8  This is discussed further in About.

9    One of the foremost proponents of this argument is the philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn, see e.g. ‘Free Speech and its Relation to Government’ [1948].
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