Governing trust in a digital platform society
José van Dijck (Utrecht University)
In the past decade, traditional institutions of science and media have been undercut by a new dynamic of online disinformation that forces these institutions to reflect more fundamentally on the new meaning of ‘trust’. A handful of platforms—particularly social media networks such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter—have dislocated power from legacy media organizations’ production and distribution functions and have destabilized their institutional authority. So far, social media platforms have failed to develop alternative standards for trustworthiness that are badly needed to remedy some persistent problems plaguing the new information order, such as context collapse, confirmation bias, and polarization push.
The question raised by this lecture is: How can we govern trust in a changing media landscape? Can we redress the tensions between the (unruly) practices of online platforms and the (ruled) practices of media and science? On the one hand, we need to consider social media platforms’ responsibilities to build (algorithmic) models of news distribution that are more responsive to societal concerns of lowered epistemic trust. Social media platforms may take example from rules and standards long tested by legacy media to establish institutional and professional trust. On the other hand, public institutions will have to reinvent themselves in order to restore their independence and credibility in a changing media landscape where public debates have become governed by big data, platforms, and algorithms.