Trust Compression

Trust Compression, or How to Avoid Info-Cynicism

Imagine you are trying to figure out the best person to drive you to the airport. You ask your friend whether Pedro, Leann, or Koko would be the best person to drive you. “Oh, I’ve asked them all at one point or another,” she says. “I think they all have problems if you ask me.”

Taking this to mean they’re equivalent, you decide on Leann. She turns up forty-five minutes late, manages to get in a fender bender on the way there, and then insists that you reimburse her for mileage “plus 20 percent” before you get out of the car. You head back to your friend and relay the story. “Yeah,” she says, “she did the exact same thing to me.”

Stunned, you ask why she didn’t warn you. “Well,” she says, “Leann is always late and did crash her last four cars. But Pedro plays the radio too loud, and Koko never stops talking about her cat. Like I said, they all have problems.”

We think you would agree that your friend here failed you in offering a recommendation, even if it is technically true that “they all have problems.” What you really needed to know was how reputable each one was relative to the others. And one of the choices was very far apart from the others in that respect. The way your friend described them didn’t convey the vast differences in reliability. Instead, the differences among them were minimized.

This minimizing of difference in quality or reliability is what we call “trust compression,” because it takes the vast distances between different sources in reliability and shrinks them to the point where they all look roughly the same. And while it’s unlikely one would make the sort of mistake in real life described in our going-to-the-airport example, people make it on the web all the time.

For instance, there’s a huge distance between a site like the Mayo Clinic, a research hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, and Dakota Bob’s All-Natural Holistic Health Supplements.2 But if you start to think of both sites as being compromised—the Mayo Clinic is dependent on people getting sick and coming to it for treatment, and All-Natural Health Supplements is trying to convince you you’re sick and need to buy sugar pills—then what we have is trust compression. What starts out as a chasm between a reputable site known all the world over and a fly-by-night holistic remedies site shrinks to the point of being negligible. Both are compromised. Neither can be trusted.

What’s at stake is not just a bad ride to the airport. When trust compression reaches this level, where it seems like everybody’s got an agenda and no one can be trusted, well, you’ve reached a state where unscrupulous people have you in their clutches. There’s a reason why trust compression is often the goal of disinformation campaigns, whether the campaign is run by a foreign country, a global corporation, or a domestic lobbying group. When we believe no source is more trustworthy than any other, how do we decide who’s right?

History tells us this works out various ways, none particularly good. In authoritarian regimes, creating a broad cynicism about all sources of expertise—the press, academics, professionals—serves to make sure political power, not truth-seeking, is the ultimate arbiter of what’s true. If the best reporter is no better than the worst tabloid hack, why not just get the news directly from your leader or your political faction? Or why not choose academics based on their political allegiance rather than their credentials and expertise? They’re all the same, right? Pick the one best for your cause. Or dispense with them altogether.3

When it comes to corporate disinformation, creating trust compression is a way to hide that a former competing theory has moved to a majority/minority or even consensus status. The classic example of this is cigarettes. Early on, there was much debate about whether smoking caused cancer, but by the 1950s there was a consolidation of the research. It became clear that what had initially just been one theoretical position among many (that smoking caused cancer) was quickly approaching consensus status. The tobacco industry came up with a plan: “flood the zone” with so much low-quality conflicting information that instead of interested citizens seeing the overwhelming consensus on the issue, they would be confused about who to believe and conclude that the matter was still one under debate.4 (It wasn’t, and even now, 480,000 people die from tobacco-related illnesses each year, partly as a result of the industry’s success in creating confusion. This is about one out of every five deaths in the United States.)5

To sum up: we tend to think of a gullible person as someone who believes everything they hear. But on the web, it’s more often the opposite. Gullibility presents itself as the inability to believe anything, no matter how authoritative, proven, and trustworthy that source may be. And the social consequences of this inability can be devastating.