Standing Naked in the Storm– European Citizens’ Trust in Social Media, Users, Information

Abstract

We have surveyed users in 7 European countries about the factors that underwrite their trust in and on Facebook. We identified three trust pillars: (1) self-confidence to recognize and hedge platform related risks; (2) trust in the platform’s ability and willingness to protect users against online harms; and (3) national and European platform regulation, and measured their role in shaping users' trusting attitudes towards the platform and the users and information they encounter on the platform.

Our finding suggests serious deficiencies in how trust in such a critical societal infrastructure is structured. First, we found that trust in and on the platform is mostly defined by generic, rather than platform-specific trust attitudes and expectations. Second, our data suggests that the two most important platform-specific trust pillars are rather shaky. On the one hand, users trust the platform to protect them, while there is ample evidence of Facebook and its parent company, Meta to not act in the best interest of their users. On the other hand, users base their trust on their perceived ability to protect themselves, while our data shows that they do not seem to use the even the very limited set of tools the platform provides them for such self-protection.

Lastly, while governments seem to be best positioned to reign in global digital service providers, and in recent years the EU spent enormous amounts of resources to regulate online platforms, users don’t seem to expect regulation to make platforms and the information herein trustworthy. Such lack of expectations towards the only agents in this ecosystem who can provide any effective trustworthiness safeguards vis-à-vis platforms is somewhat disturbing.

Keywords: trust, trustworthiness, platfoms, Facebook, regulation

JEL Classification: K23, K30, Z13,