Trust is about understanding

Trust is the invisible infrastructure of public communication - and therefore of every democracy. It enables citizens to accept political information as credible, journalistic institutions as legitimate and democratic processes to be based on consent. But this infrastructure has become fragile.

Digital technologies are profoundly changing the foundations of public communication. Strategic disinformation, AI-generated deepfakes and algorithmic attention economies are undermining credibility in a low-threshold and usually barely perceptible way. In addition, there are economic constraints in journalism, which mean that editorial decisions are increasingly based on reach and click figures. The result is a double crisis of trust: on the part of the public, the potential mistrust of journalistic media is growing and on the part of media professionals, the pressure to follow economic rather than journalistic goals in order to be able to reach an audience at all.

If trust is the prerequisite for a democratic public sphere, then democracy itself is also under pressure. It loses its communicative stability. But what does trust actually mean - and why is it so central to the public sphere?

The sociologist Georg Simmel described trust as a "hypothesis of future action", i.e. as a risky social advance that makes cooperation possible in the first place. Without trust, according to Simmel, social life would merely be a sequence of expressions of mistrust, control and withdrawal. Trust is therefore an act of social openness: a conscious risk of making oneself vulnerable in order to gain the ability to act together.

Niklas Luhmann took this idea further in his sociological theory. For him, trust is a "mechanism for reducing social complexity". We trust because we have to act together, even though we cannot know everything the other person knows - and will never be able to do so completely. Trust fills gaps in knowledge and makes the normal state of ignorance functional.

In public communication, this means that the media and other communicative institutions create collective trust. Journalists, editorial offices, academia and politics form a system of mutual security of expectations. When these structures become fragile, new uncertainties arise, not only about the content, but also about the credibility of the communicators themselves. The loss of trust is therefore not an individual, but a systemic process with implications for society as a whole.

With digitalization, the relationship of trust built up through communication is shifting further. We no longer rely solely on institutions, but also increasingly on technical systems such as algorithms, platforms and protocols. These new intermediaries make communication more efficient, but also less transparent. Trust is also becoming a question of the underlying code and no longer just the reputation of the communicator.

An algorithm that is used to select our messages is not a neutral intermediary, but follows the built-in preferences of those who have coded it. This creates a paradoxical situation: we are dependent on technical communication systems throughout society, but we barely understand how they work and they are also in private hands. This eliminates the necessary transparency and public accountability that would be required to use this communication system in a trustworthy manner. Trust is thus depersonalized and at the same time becomes more fragile.

One technology that picks up on this development and reverses it is blockchain. It can be understood as a technical translation of trust. Instead of placing trust in central actors, it distributes it across a network of participants. Cryptographic processes are used to store information in a tamper-proof manner; authorship and changes remain traceable.

Blockchain technologies thus create transparency, authentication and traceability without the need for a central authority. Journalistic projects could thus demonstrate how content can be verified decentrally and authorship permanently secured. At European level, the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) is working on transferring similar principles to public administration processes.

Blockchain is not a panacea, but it opens up a space for restructuring trust. Trust is not replaced here, but operationalized: as a verifiable relationship between actors, systems and data. However, this technology also needs to be fundamentally understood before it can be used extensively. It is therefore necessary to develop literacy and skills both individually and, above all, socially in order to use these technologies in a democratically functional way.

This means that communication science itself is also challenged. It is not enough to analyze the transformation of public communication. It must help shape it. Transformation thus becomes not just an object, but a task.