This post draws on a talk by Jeff Hancock describing three types of trust: "individual trust, which exists between people based on their personal experiences of each other; distributed trust, which is the social network of trust, including those you trust and those trusted by those you trust; and institutional trust, which is based on an institution's role in society, for example, trust in established media, government, academia, etc." The suggestion in the article is that "social media is fundamentally built on the concept of distributed trust," and that this form of trust may be replacing institutional trust. And Jesse McCrosky writes, "it seems plausible that the decreased value in shared truth could lead to a decay in the importance of truth itself." Maybe, but let's call institutional trust centralized trust to get a proper perspective. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are centralized; we should lump them in with other centralized institutions, and maybe rethink where the blame lies for the putative decay of truth.
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