Shifting Trust: Examining How Trust and Distrust Emerge, Transform, and Collapse in COVID-19 Information Seeking

During crises like COVID-19, individuals are inundated with conflicting and time-sensitive information that drives a need for rapid assessment of the trustworthiness and reliability of information sources and platforms. This parallels evolutions in information infrastructures, ranging from social media to government data platforms. Distinct from current literature, which presumes a static relationship between the presence or absence of trust and people’s behaviors, our mixed-methods research focuses on situated trust, or trust that is shaped by people’s information-seeking and assessment practices through emerging information platforms (e.g., social media, crowdsourced systems, COVID data platforms). Our findings characterize the shifts in trustee (what/who people trust) from information on social media to the social media platform(s), how distrust manifests skepticism in issues of data discrepancy, the insufficient presentation of uncertainty, and how this trust and distrust shift over time. We highlight the deep challenges in existing information infrastructures that influence trust and distrust formation.