Full disclosure: This research into the new dynamics of trust was conducted through 2025, leading into the September launch of Authentitas, a platform defending journalism, and the wider information ecosystem, from disinformation.
Trust In Modernity
The eminent social theorist Anthony Giddens gave us a foundational framework that has, over some 40 years, lost none of its bite. Modern life, he argued, transforms the very nature of trust. We move from the personal and local – the tradesman we know, the doctor we've met – to what he called 'trust in abstract systems': the invisible, unknowable networks of expertise and institutional process upon which we entirely depend, yet can't verify. Whether a consumer believes a news report or buys into a brand, they're trusting not the product alone, but an extensive architecture of promise, accountability and institutional credibility. That architecture has quietly done its job for decades. It's now under severe and accelerating pressure.
Some Inconvenient Truths
- The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2026 ranks misinformation and disinformation as the second most severe global risk, holding its place in the highest tier for the short and mid-term and out to 2036.
- The Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report finds global trust in news stagnant at 40% for three consecutive years. The UK is down 16 points since 2015. Fewer than one in six Gen Z consumers in the United States trusts the news.
- The OECD's survey of 60,000 people across 30 countries reaches a similarly dispiriting conclusion. More people distrust the media than trust it.
The Payoffs Of Distrust
The standard responses – invest in transparency, communicate our values, demonstrate our standards – share a fundamental flaw. They assume that distrust is simply the absence of trust, and that repairs can be effected by removing the obstacles. They can't. Because distrust isn't an absence, it's an active stance, one that - today more than ever - delivers real psychological and social value to the many who are choosing to adopt it.
Research across some 200,000 individuals documents what's been called the 'cynical genius illusion': the widespread belief that sceptical people are more intelligent, even though the evidence shows the reverse. Online communities amplify this relentlessly. Distrust confers status, signals independence, creates belonging. Giddens furthermore noted that explanation, offering more and better information, provides no clarity here. Awareness of complexity doesn’t remove the trust problem. It deepens it.
When we say 'trust us', we're often asking people to surrender benefits they're actively enjoying. Distrust can be an increasingly reasonable response, to an increasingly unreasonable world.
Michael Bayler Authentitas
What Digital Did
There's a deeper problem still, predating social media and reaching beyond disinformation campaigns and fake content. Digital transformation has dissolved a verification layer that we never noticed till it was gone. In the physical world, basic facts verified themselves through presence. We knew The Times was The Times because we bought the paper from a newsagent we'd used for years. We knew the doctor was qualified because we met her, and her credentials were on the wall of the surgery.
Material reality answered the question. No trust was required.
Digital stripped this entirely. A website can claim to be anything. A byline can be fabricated. Content can be silently altered. AI generates text, image, audio and video indistinguishable from human creation. We break through to a new and critical insight, when we grasp that this isn't a problem of trust. It's a problem of proof. The philosopher Onora O'Neill identified the paradox in her 2002 BBC Reith Lecture. The more we demand accountability and transparency, the less we seem to trust. Her distinction is precise and useful. Trust was never designed to answer factual questions. It evolved to handle uncertainty about judgement, intention and character – the very things that can't be verified. Today, without an infrastructure of proof, verification questions are thrust into trust's domain – where they don't belong and can't be resolved.
The Question That Follows
We're living through rising autocracy, industrial-scale disinformation and an AI-enabled dilution of verifiable reality. In that environment, asking audiences to extend trust, in the absence of proof, isn't a communications challenge - it's a category error. They need to know that an authentic human being, and an accountable institution, stand behind the information that matters. The most urgent question here isn't, it turns out, how we restore trust. It's how we provide sufficient proof to make trust a rational response once more.
Sources
- Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Polity Press.
- World Economic Forum (2026). Global Risks Report 2026. January 2026.
- Newman, N. et al. (2025). Digital News Report 2025. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford.
- OECD (2024). Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions.
- Gallup/Walton Family Foundation (2023). State of American Youth Survey.
- Stavrova, O. & Ehlebracht, D. (2019). The cynical genius illusion. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45(2).
- Cooke, D. et al. (2025). As good as a coin toss: human detection of AI-generated content. Communications of the ACM, 68(10).
- O'Neill, O. (2002). A Question of Trust. BBC Reith Lectures. Cambridge University Press.
