The wide scope of mistrust in institutions, and the discrediting of self-corrective measures
(Note: if you are pressed for time, I recommend, rather than toiling through my excursions, skipping down to the video near the bottom entitled “The Internet is a Machine that Devours Trust.” There, blogger Hank Green takes you down a trail from the Reformation to today, illustrating the impact of new technologies on social evolution. It’s 33 minutes long, but Green is so clear and articulate you can speed it up 50% or more without missing the main points. Speeding it up makes Green appear even more animated, which is fun. I have some interesting things to say, but I can’t hold a candle to Hank Green for infotainment.)
In a critique of the 2024 election, veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz observed “right now, fewer Americans trust the institutions that govern them than ever before . . . fewer Americans trust the people who run those institutions.” (See video at very end of this post for the interview with Luntz on 60 Minutes Australia.) You may not like Luntz’s politics (he’s a traditional fiscal conservative), but he’s an experienced, astute, and objective reader of the political scene who keeps his ear to the ground in polls and focus groups. His comments on trust in the video begin at 17:30. You also might find his portrayal of the 2024 presidential race—beginning at 2:20—insightful, if uncomfortable for fans of Kamala Harris (of which I am one).
(Note the videotaped interview with Luntz took place before it was found that Trump got less than 50% of the vote; the Australian interviewer mistakenly characterized the result as “very definitive.” Which it was not, as was obvious to anyone familiar with American politics and that blot on democracy known as the Electoral College, even before the revelation he got less than half the vote.)
We tend to think of the political Right Wing as the group most intensely mistrustful of government, but the results of a Pew Research poll in 2024 (below) showed a steep decline of trust overall in government between 1960 (73%) and 1980 (27%) among both parties, and over the last forty years has undulated up and down in a generally downhill trend to land at 37% among Democrats and 8%(!) among Republicans in 2023, for an overall percentage of 19% (see the second chart in the Pew report which separates the parties. Republican sentiment appears to be more strongly responsive to which party holds the White House). There was a small rise among all respondents between 2023 and 2024 (19% to 22%).
Sorry for blurry image; see the Pew Research poll for a sharper image and interactive pointing for exact percentages.
What’s most worrying is the decline of trust in all public institutions, not just the government: in medicine, education, courts, law enforcement, professional journalism, libraries, charitable organizations, and even science. Mistrust of medical science is hardly confined to the political Right, as disputes over vaccines and fluoridation going back decades have shown. According to the historian Yuval Harari , “destroying all trust in these institutions . . . [paves] the way to dictatorship. . . . Democracy works on trust, but if you destroy all trust, the only alternative left to hold society together is with terror, which is what dictatorships do.” (See video below; pick it up at 10 minutes.)
Above, Sam Harris interviews Yuval Harari on trust in institutions, and the contribution of social media and artificial intelligence to the loss of trust.
One of the big ideas that stands out in Harari’s recent book, Nexus, is the concept of “self-corrective” measures within an institution or tightly-knit web of institutions (such as the scientific community broadly). Self-corrective measures make arrival at the truth possible when mistakes are made or disputes arise. Scientific papers are peer-reviewed before publication (in a respected journal, anyway) and as soon as published are scrutinized further by other scientists. Other scientists are quick to pounce on flaws or falsehoods in the papers of others. The bar is set high all around. Falsities or frauds in science are sooner or later exposed by the method of arriving at truth. We say that trust in science is fostered by “the scientific method.” So science advances to yield findings that have a high degree of credibility—until the next finding calls them into question, or modifies them in a way that might even look like contradiction. There are physicists today who explore exceptions or modifications to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Even that renowned theory, despite having stood the test of time, is not sacrosanct in the scientific world—because science, unlike religion, has no place for sanctity.
Professional journalism obeys the same principles. The U.S. Constitution, which spells out a means of amending itself, is a self-corrective document. That stands in contrast to religious dogma such as the Ten Commandments, which stay frozen in time.
Ironically, institutional self-corrections may exacerbate mistrust on the part of the public—or that segment of the public eager to have their confirmation biases reinforced. When HHS changed Covid guidance in light of new evidence in 2020-2021, they were accused of incompetence or deliberately misleading the public with questionable intent. When journalists find other journalists guilty of lying, fraud, or irresponsibility, the fact that professional self-correction works is lost on the public in the outrage over the original offense.
Truth, Juval Harari maintains, is hard-won, rare, and usually complicated. Its rarity and complexity make the public’s respect for self-corrective mechanisms difficult to come by. Rapid information flows in the digital realm demand quick judgements, and with so little time to reflect, the truth often gets swept aside in the blur.
Social media have made low levels of trust permanent
A striking feature of Pew’s chart of the decline of trust in government is how it never recovered from the sharp drop in trust between 2001 (54%) and 2011 (17%). Part of this decline can be explained by economic and political developments: the Great Recession dragged everyone down; the Obama presidency dragged Republicans down, the Trump presidency dragged Democrats down (see the second chart in the Pew report for the discrepancies between the parties)—but the range of the ups and downs narrowed, bumping along near the bottom: trust went down in 2011 and stayed there.
What happened in social media circa 2010 is part—perhaps the greatest part—of the explanation for the bottoming-out of trust in government. It came about in the pursuit of engagement, the currency of a social media platform’s success. The longer the user stays on the platform and the more intense the involvement—engagement—the more paid ads are seen. The more engagement, the more sales. Nothing engages readers more than posts conveying anger, outrage, resentment, and hate. And outrage against institutions and the people in them compounds mistrust against everything it touches.
But, users have been increasingly scrolling and clicking on Facebook since the 2000-oughts. What changed in the beginning of the second decade that might explain a chronic lapse into historically low trust in government?
(Note the following implies that in this case correlation is evidence of causation, although not proof. My claim is that the evidence is so powerful it proves the changes in social media circa 2010 are a leading cause of trust scraping the bottom of the well for the last 14 years.)
Writing in The Atlantic in 2019, under the headline “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks,” writers Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell put their finger on two innovations—described under the subhead in “Upgrading the Outrage Machine”—that lit up social media with bonfires that rage on to this day. The first was Facebook’s introduction of the ‘Like’ button into their news feed, accompanied by an algorithm that determined what posts a user would see, based on predicted engagement. Haidt and Rose-Stockwell wrote:
The News Feed’s algorithmic ordering of content flattened the hierarchy of credibility. Any post by any producer could stick to the top of our feeds as long as it generated engagement. “Fake news” would later flourish in this environment, as a personal blog post was given the same look and feel as a story from The New York Times.
Also in 2009, Twitter added the “Retweet” button. Chris Wetherell, one of the engineers who created the Retweet button, later admitted to regretting it. As Wetherell watched the first Twitter mobs use his new tool, he thought to himself: “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”
(The metaphor of a 4-year-old with a loaded weapon reminds one of the emotional immaturity of the man with one of the most potent weapons in the social media universe: Elon Musk. Although let’s not be too harsh on Musk—his emotional age is more like 14 than 4.)
It gets worse: the internet itself makes mistrust of institutions inevitable
Social media’s role in the permanent depression of trust in institutions triggers calls for regulation. But regulation of social media will not alter the structure of the internet itself. It’s a structure that, as long as free speech is honored, facilitates the splintering of the body politic into factions—in principle, millions of them. Those factions that are willing to sacrifice truth for the sake of power are free to tell whatever narratives evoke the strongest emotions in their audience, true or fabricated. At present, those voices have the upper hand in gaining power, and it so happens that those on the political Right have an influence far beyond their actual numbers. This is probably due to a combination of zealotry and ability to spin the most viral narratives, but from whatever causes, their footprint is large, and brutal. Their behavior is reckless, but the internet has no inherent self-corrective mechanisms to tame their recklessness. They stomp all over norms and ethics with impunity.
Happily, to conclude this post I’m giving you a treat. Below is a video presentation by a brilliant, passionate young journalist with tousled hair and expansive hand gestures named Hank Green, who has reams to say about media and how they shape our social landscape. And he makes watching fun. Green applies a light touch to matters of great seriousness, such as the explosive impact of new technologies on society, ranging from the printing press to radio, TV, and finally digital communications, in particular the internet. Provocative ideas jump out from his narrative like sparks from a hit of lightning.
Green’s nominal topic in this video is populism, but he uses populism as a launch pad for a Big Picture analysis of how our society, repeatedly rocked by new technologies, has arrived at “Our Terrible Moment.” As for trust, he characterizes the internet as “a machine that devours trust.” Why? His most crucial point: we are not prepared for “the powerful spell these [digital] systems are casting on our brains.”
Whether we are not prepared because of genetic evolution or social evolution—or both—is not an area Hank Green ventures into. What’s more, in this post he also does not venture into the landmine-rich terrain of artificial intelligence, where trust is even more susceptible to breakage. (The last is a subject explored at length in Harari’s Nexus. Your next read in preparing for the approaching chaos.)
Herewith Hank Green, whose video is a must-watch for those attempting to understand our perilous times:
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Also, and more prosaically, Frank Luntz’s take on the 2024 presidential election and our divisive politics generally: