From PR Week
[Opinion]: Communicators, content and trust
By Simon Erskine Locke
Trust underpins the economy. Almost every metric of trust — from Edelman’s Trust Barometer to Harris Poll data — shows declines across the board.
The erosion of trust has been driven by fundamental changes in political discourse, disinformation, the undermining of authoritative sources of news and the rise of social media. Artificial intelligence adds another dimension with hallucinations, manipulated images and videos. From a corporate vantage point, increasing digital fraud, imposter and hijacked content, as well as deepfakes of CEOs, are growing concerns...
This toxic stew is driving a fundamental societal change, according to University of California professor Hany Farid, a world-leading authority on digital forensics. We are moving from a world in which “trust but verify” underpinned consumers’ relationships with the political class, the media and the digital economy, to a world that starts with “verify then trust.”
We need a new set of tools for the “verify, then trust” world. It is not happenstance that account verification, two-step authentication and platforms for fact-checked, curated and authentic content are increasingly the norm...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
