Keyword: trust

More Than Justifications an Analysis of Information Needs in Explanations and Motivations to Disable Personalization external link

Resendez, V., Kieslich, K., Helberger, N. & Vreese, C.H. de
Journalism Studies, 2025

Abstract

There is consensus that algorithmic news recommenders should be explainable to inform news readers of potential risks. However, debates continue over which information users need and which stakeholders should access this information. As the debate continues, researchers also call for more control over algorithmic news recommender systems, for example, by turning off personalized recommendations. Despite this call, it is unclear the extent to which news readers will use this feature. To add nuance to the discussion, we analyzed 586 responses to two open-ended questions: i) what information needs to contribute to trustworthiness perceptions of new recommendations, and ii) whether people want the ability to turn off personalization. Our results indicate that most participants found knowing the sources of news items important for trusting a recommendation system. Additionally, more than half of the participants were inclined to disable personalization. The most common reasons to turn off personalization included concerns about bias or filter bubbles and a preference to consume generalized news. These findings suggest that news readers have different information needs for explanations when interacting with an algorithmic news recommender and that many news readers prefer to disable the usage of personalized news recommendations.

control, DSA, news recommenders, Personalisation, trust

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False sense of security and a flurry of misplaced trust: the construction of trust in and by Facebook external link

Bodó, B., Bene, M. & Boda, Z.
Information, Communication & Society, 2025

Abstract

In this research, we highlight the fundamental forces that shape the dynamics of trust in the digital society by examining how platform-specific and platform-mediated trust is constructed on Facebook. We define three potential pillars of trust considerations on which user trust in and on the platform may rest: (1) self-confidence in recognizing and hedging platform-related risks, (2) trust in the platform’s self-regulatory capacity, and (3) governmental platform regulation. We test our hypotheses on a unique cross-national survey covering seven European countries. Our results show that platform-specific trust is based on the perceived trustworthiness of the operating company and self-confidence in protection, but these two factors are less effective in building trust when either of them is lower, suggesting their amplifying rather than complementing role in building trust.

trust

Bibtex

The Frameworks of Trust and Trustlessness Around Algorithmic Control Technologies: A Lost Sense of Community download

Bodó, B. & Weigl, L.
In: Public Governance and Emerging Technologies Values: Trust, and Regulatory Compliance, Springer, 2025, ISBN: 9783031847486

Abstract

Certain techno-political infrastructures, e.g. blockchains, aim to replace our existing social and institutional modes of producing trust as a social resource. Can they successfully do that, without the reliance on the very same institutions, which could safeguard and guarantee their trustworthiness in the first place? By now we have more than a decade of experience trying to build autonomous, code-driven, private ordering infrastructures, designed to complement, disrupt, or replace both private and public institutions. The revolution of these ‘trustless’ digital technologies is yet to happen, raising concerns about their promises to address the existing trust challenges of centralized institutions, their capacity to eliminate the societal reliance on trust, and the potential consequences thereof. Therefore, in this chapter, we pose the following questions: How does trustlessness through the elimination of more-or-less trusted middlemen impact our values and our sense of belonging? How does the decision to end trust maintenance through trustless technologies impact the cultivation of a sense of community within a society? This chapter addresses these questions by critically reviewing the claims surrounding the trustlessness of automated, code-as-law-based governance systems in the field of digital identity management—an area that continues to command the attention of various organizations and institutions.

algoritmen, trust

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Trust and Safety in the Age of AI – the economics and practice of the platform-based discourse apparatus external link

Weigl, L. & Bodó, B.
2025

Abstract

In recent years social media services emerged as key infrastructures for a plethora of societal conversations around politics, values, culture, science, and more. Through their Trust and Safety practices, they are playing a central role in shaping what their users may know, may believe in, what kinds of values, truths and untruths, or opinions they are exposed to. The rapid emergence of various tools, such as AI and the likes brought further complexities to how these societal conversations are conducted online. On the one hand, platforms started to heavily rely on automated tools and algorithmic agents to identify various forms of speech, some of them flagged for further human review, others being filtered automatically. On the other hand, cheap and ubiquitous access to generative AI systems also produce a flood of new speech on social media platforms. Content moderation and filtering, as one of the largest ‘Trust and Safety’ activities, is, on the surface, the most visible, and understandable activity which could protect users from all the harms stemming from ignorant or malicious actors in the online space. But, as we argue in this paper, content moderation is much more than that. Platforms, through their AI-human content moderation stack are ordering key societal discourses. The Foucauldian understanding of society emphasizes that discourse is knowledge is power: we know what the discourse reveals to us, and we use this knowledge as power to produce the world around us, render it legible through discourse. This logic, alongside the radically shifting rules of information economics, which reduced the cost of information to zero, challenges the old institutions, rules, procedures, discourses, and subsequent knowledge and power structures. In this paper, we first explore the practical realities of content moderation based on an expert interview study with Trust and Safety professionals, and a supporting document analysis, based on data published through the DSA Transparency Database. We reconstruct these empirical insights as an analytical model – a discourse apparatus stack – in the Foucauldian framework. This helps to identify the real systemic challenges content moderation faces, but fails to address.

Artificial intelligence, automated filtering, Content moderation, Foucault, information economics, Platforms, trust

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Trust in context: The impact of regulation on blockchain and DeFi external link

Bodó, B. & Filippi, P. de
Regulation & Governance, 2024

Abstract

Trust is a key resource in financial transactions. Traditional financial institutions, and novel blockchain-based decentralized financial (DeFi) services rely on fundamentally different sources of trust and confidence. The former relies on heavy regulation, trusted intermediaries, clear rules (and restrictions) on market competition, and long-standing informal expectations on what banks and other financial intermediaries are supposed to do or not to do. The latter rely on blockchain technology to provide confidence in the outcome of rules encoded in protocols and smart contracts. Their main promise is to create confidence in the way the blockchain architecture enforces rules, rather than to trust banks, regulators, and markets. In this article, we compare the trust architectures surrounding these two financial systems. We provide a deeper analysis of how proposed regulation in the blockchain space affects the code- and confidence-based architectures which so far have underwrote DeFi. We argue that despite the solid safeguards and guarantees which code can offer, the confidence in DeFi is still very much dependent on more traditional trust-enhancing mechanisms, such as code governance, and antifraud regulation to address some of the issues which currently plague this domain, and which have no immediate, purely software-based solutions. What is more, given the risks of bugs or scams in the DeFi space, regulation and trusted intermediaries may need to play a more active role, in order for DeFi to gain the trust of the next generation of users.

blockchain, Regulation, trust

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Maintaining trust in a technologized public sector external link

Bodó, B. & Janssen, H.
Policy and Society, 2022

Abstract

Emerging technologies permeate and potentially disrupt a wide spectrum of our social, economic, and political relations. Various state institutions, including education, law enforcement, and healthcare, increasingly rely on technical components, such as automated decision-making systems, e-government systems, and other digital tools to provide cheap, efficient public services, and supposedly fair, transparent, disinterested, and accountable public administration. The increased interest in various blockchain-based solutions from central bank digital currencies, via tokenized educational credentials, and distributed ledger-based land registries to self-sovereign identities is the latest, still mostly unwritten chapter in a long history of standardized, objectified, automated, technocratic, and technologized public administration. The rapid, (often) unplanned, and uncontrolled technologization of public services (as happened in the hasty adoption of distance-learning and teleconferencing systems during Corona Virus Disease (COVID) lockdowns) raises complex questions about the use of novel technological components, which may or may not be ultimately adequate for the task for which they are used. The question whether we can trust the technical infrastructures the public sector uses when providing public services is a central concern in an age where trust in government is declining: If the government’s artificial intelligence system that detects welfare fraud fails, the public’s confidence in the government is ultimately hit. In this paper, we provide a critical assessment of how the use of potentially untrustworthy (private) technological systems including blockchain-based systems in the public sector may affect trust in government. We then propose several policy options to protect the trust in government even if some of their technological components prove fundamentally untrustworthy.

blockchain, frontpage, Technologie en recht, trust

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The commodification of trust external link

Bodó, B.
Blockchain & Society Policy Research Lab Research Nodes, num: 1, 2021

Abstract

Fundamental, wide-ranging, and highly consequential transformations take place in interpersonal, and systemic trust relations due to the rapid adoption of complex, planetary-scale digital technological innovations. Trust is remediated by planetary scale techno-social systems, which leads to the privatization of trust production in society, and the ultimate commodification of trust itself. Modern societies rely on communal, public and private logics of trust production. Communal logics produce trust by the group for the group, and are based on familiar, ethnic, religious or tribal relations, professional associations epistemic or value communities, groups with shared location or shared past. Public trust logics developed in the context of the modern state, and produce trust as a free public service. Abstract, institutionalized frameworks, institutions, such as the press, or public education, science, various arms of the bureaucratic state create familiarity, control, and insurance in social, political, and economic relations. Finally, private trust producers sell confidence as a product: lawyers, accountants, credit rating agencies, insurers, but also commercial brands offer trust for a fee. With the emergence of the internet and digitization, a new class of private trust producers emerged. Online reputation management services, distributed ledgers, and AI-based predictive systems are widely adopted technological infrastructures, which are designed to facilitate trust-necessitating social, economic interactions by controlling the past, the present and the future, respectively. These systems enjoy immense economic success, and they are adopted en masse by individuals and institutional actors alike. The emergence of the private, technical means of trust production paves the way towards the widescale commodification of trust, where trust is produced as a commercial activity, conducted by private parties, for economic gain, often far removed from the loci where trust-necessitating social interactions take place. The remediation and consequent privatization and commodification of trust production has a number of potentially adverse social effects: it may decontextualize trust relationships; it removes trust from the local social, cultural relational contexts; it changes the calculus of interpersonal trust relations. Maybe more importantly as more and more social and economic relations are conditional upon having access to, and good standing in private trust infrastructures, commodification turns trust into the question of continuous labor, or devastating exclusion. By invoking Karl Polanyi’s work on fictious commodities, I argue that the privatization, and commodification of trust may have a catastrophic impact on the most fundamental layers of the social fabric.

ai, blockchains, commodification, frontpage, Informatierecht, Karl Polanyi, reputation, trust, trust production

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Mediated trust: A theoretical framework to address the trustworthiness of technological trust mediators external link

Bodó, B.
New Media & Society, 2020

Abstract

This article considers the impact of digital technologies on the interpersonal and institutional logics of trust production. It introduces the new theoretical concept of technology-mediated trust to analyze the role of complex techno-social assemblages in trust production and distrust management. The first part of the article argues that globalization and digitalization have unleashed a crisis of trust, as traditional institutional and interpersonal logics are not attuned to deal with the risks introduced by the prevalence of digital technologies. In the second part, the article describes how digital intermediation has transformed the traditional logics of interpersonal and institutional trust formation and created new trust-mediating services. Finally, the article asks as follows: why should we trust these technological trust mediators? The conclusion is that at best, it is impossible to establish the trustworthiness of trust mediators, and that at worst, we have no reason to trust them.

digitale technologie, frontpage, Informatierecht, Regulering, trust

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User Perspectives on the News Personalisation Process: Agency, Trust and Utility as Building Blocks external link

Monzer, C., Möller, J., Helberger, N. & Eskens, S.
Digital Journalism, vol. 8, num: 9, pp: 1142-1162, 2020

Abstract

With the increasing use of algorithms in news distribution, commentators warn about its possible impacts on the changing relationship between the news media and news readers. To understand the meaning of news personalisation strategies to users, we investigated how they currently experience news personalisation, perceive their role in the personalisation process, and envision increasing the utility of personalised news by giving users more agency and fostering trust. We conducted four focus groups with online news readers in Germany. For the analysis, grounded theory techniques were suitable due to their applicability in reconstructing user perspectives through their own experiences. We found that (1) users fail to distinguish between news personalisation and commercial targeting, which may negatively bias their perception; (2) there is a contradiction in how users perceive themselves as active participants in the process, but lack the means to exercise agency; (3) user concerns extend beyond privacy to what information they receive and their right to personal autonomy—a solution requires offering users the ability to dynamically adjust their “news interest profiles”; (4) while news personalisation strategies afford new opportunities for introducing reciprocity in the media-audience relationship, negotiating competing logics of journalistic, personal and algorithmic curation remains a challenge.

agency, focus groups, frontpage, grounded theory, news personalisation, personal curation, Privacy, trust, utility

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