As AI continues to make its way into more aspect of life, some interesting trends about how the public feels about these new, increasingly pervasive services have been observed. The developers of AI promise that their systems will produce reliable, comprehensive, and bias-free results. But national surveys consistently show that the public is sceptical towards AI. And yet experimental studies show that in practice, people do trust AI more than one might suspect. 

Can increasing AI literacy help to overcome this deficit, and teach us what to trust when it comes to AI, and where we’re right to be cautious? And if so, how should literacy initiatives balance goals to learn how AI works in practice, and how AI could or should work in the future?

Today’s guest Dr Heather Ford has been thinking extensively about these issues. She’s an ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Communications at UTS. She is the Coordinator of the UTS Data and AI Ethics Cluster, Affiliate of the UTS Data Science Institute, and Associate of the UTS Centre for Media Transition. She was appointed to the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE) in 2023.

Heather Ford is currently conducting research funded by the Australian Research Council and the Wikimedia Foundation on Wikipedia bias, question and answering technologies, digital literacy and the impact of generative AI on our information environment. Previously she has worked for global technology corporations and non-profits in the US, UK, South Africa and Kenya. Her research focuses on the social implications of media technologies and the ways in which they might be better designed to prevent misinformation, social exclusion, and harms as a result of algorithmic bias. 

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We have a lot of threats to trust around the world. These include misinformation, political polarisation, the spread of hate online, and declining trust in political and social institutions. We also know that much of this has happened as more and more people worldwide have developed social media profiles and engaged with other online. But what, if anything, is the connection between the two? Should we be developing new measures for digital trust, or do the problems lie elsewhere, whether in the failure of governments to adequately deliver to their citizens, growing economic inequalities, or anxieties about cultural change? And how could critical, competent citizens who understand these problems contribute to redressing them?

Jörg Matthes is Professor of Communication Science at the University of Vienna and directs the Advertising and Media Psychology Research Group. His research spans digital media effects, advertising, sustainability communication, and empirical methods, with over 200 journal articles and numerous awards from major academic associations. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of Communication Theory and Communication Methods & Measures, both globally top-ranked journals in the field. As Chair of the Department of Communication (2014–2022), he led it to the University of Vienna to be one of the top universities in Europe and the world. He is a European Research Council Advanced Grant recipient, and also advises on academic quality assessments worldwide.

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One of the major challenges of our time is political polarisation and the dangers it presents to social cohesion. Recent editions of the Edelman Trust Barometer have identified a weakening of Australia’s social fabric, a decline of trust in key institutions, and a lack of unity behind a shared purpose.

Professor James Arvanitakis has addressed these questions at several points across his career, especially through his research in the United States, and his work on finding ways to disagree respectfully which evolved from this experience. In this episode, he explains why he thought Donald Trump would win the 2024 US election, why so many people no longer trust experts and scientific research, and how universities can evolve their mission to respond to this new environment.

Currently, James is director of the Forrest Research Foundation, which partners with Western Australia’s five universities and is based at the University of Western Australia. He is a Fulbright alumnus, having spent 12 months at the University of Wyoming as the Milward L Simpson Fellow. In 2021, he was appointed the inaugural Patron of Diversity Arts Australia in recognition of his commitment to a cultural sector that reflects the rich diversity of Australia. In 2022 he founded Respectful Disagreements, a brave spaces project that promotes the lost art of civility in political disagreement as well as the educational power of discomfort.

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Only 50% of Australians trust our governments, according to the Edelman Trust barometer from March this year. And even fewer of us trust the media – just 40%. Furthermore, 59% of Australian worry that government, business leaders, journalists & reporters are deliberately trying to mislead people. And in a time of rapid change, none of these four institutions is trusted to integrate innovation into society. Clearly, our institutions have much to do if they’re going to rebuild this trust, and take society with them. 

Today’s guest,Tom Burton, has spent his career across all four of the institutions that Edelman surveys – primarily the media, where he held senior editorial and publishing roles with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Mandarin. He was Canberra bureau chief for The Australian Financial Review, and until recently, served as that newspaper’s government editor, and also worked as a ministerial adviser and for the Australian Media and Communications Authority, as well as a US NGO, the Centre for American Progress.

Tom Burton argues that by focusing on delivery and embracing digital transformation, governments across the political spectrum can become highly effective and be perceived as such. But in order to achieve this, government, the media and academia will all need to lift their game.

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For some years now, local newspapers have been closing down in the United States. The problem’s especially pronounced in regional areas, where ‘news deserts’ have emerged as the last local journalists shut up shop. 

More recently, hundreds of new websites that claim to contain local news have arrived to try to fill this void. On examination, many turn out to be full of what’s become known as ‘pink slime’ – poor quality news that often contain misinformation or is overtly partisan.

So, what exactly is being lost in an age of many more publishers, but far fewer ethical journalists? And what can be done about it? Should US regulators crack down on content that might be more accurately categorised as campaign material?

Today’s guest, Philip Napoli, explored these questions in a lecture at the University of Sydney on the 19th of June, ahead of the International Communications Association conference on the Gold Coast. His answers have major implications for public trust, and democracy.

Philip Napoli is James R. Shepley Distinguished Professor of Public Policy in Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. He’s Director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy. His research focuses on media institutions, regulation and policy, and he’s collaborating on the University of Sydney’s Australian Research Council-funded project Valuing News: Aligning Individual, Institutional and Societal Perspectives.

Professor Napoli’s books include 2001’s Foundations of Communications Policy: Principles and Process in the Regulation of Electronic Media; 2003’s Audience Economics: Media Institutions and the Audience Marketplace; 2011’s Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences; and 2019’s Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age.

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In 2024, forty countries are holding elections, representing 41% of the world’s population. In some respects, it’s a banner year for democracy – but also, a year in which many commentators and political scientists have charted the rise of right-wing populist movements – some of which seek to undermine public trust in the fairness of elections, in the institutions that run them, and the media that reports on them. 

So what exactly is populism, and how valid are the concerns of those who see it as a threat to democracy itself?

Today’s guest, Benjamin Moffitt, is Associate Professor of Politics and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the National School of Arts and Humanities at ACU (Melbourne). He describes his research as located at the intersection of comparative politics, contemporary political theory and political communications, and focusing on contemporary populism across the globe.

Benjamin is the author of three books on populism: 'Populism' (Polity, 2020), 'Political Meritocracy and Populism: Curse or Cure?' (with Mark Chou & Octavia Bryant, Routledge, 2020), and 'The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style and Representation' (Stanford University Press, 2016). He’s also the editor of ‘Populism in Global Perspective: A Performative and Discursive Approach’ (with Pierre Ostiguy and Francisco Panizza). 

In recent times, Benjamin has been researching how populists use visual media, and how visual media covers populist leaders, for an Australian Research Council-funded project called 'The Visual Politics of Populism'. 

He has also been examining how democracy can be defended in times of political discontent and democratic instability, focusing on the role of social integration and welfare.

The photos of Donald Trump with 300 burgers discussed in this episode can be seen here.

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What really happens when we Google something? When we post to Facebook or Instagram, how much are we sharing alongside that snap of our family holiday, or our latte art? More broadly, how are these companies’ attempt to privatise our public square impacting democracy – and even the nature of information itself?

Today’s guest, Siva Vaidhyanathan, has written extensively about the shortcomings of the platform companies that are such a major part of modern life. He’s the Robertson Professor of Media Studies, and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship, at the University of Virginia.

His books include Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2018), The Googlization of Everything -- and Why We Should Worry (University of California Press, 2011), The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004), along with several books about intellectual property. He is currently writing about Elon Musk.

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Social cohesion is spiralling, with a survey last year finding that Australians’ sense of belonging, national pride and trust were reaching all-time lows. Citizens are turning off the news in record numbers, undermining the media’s role in safeguarding democracy. And dozens of regional newspapers have been closing across Australia, or going online in a greatly reduced capacity, with some areas now considered parts of a ‘news desert’.

These are just a few topics connected to mediated trust that Professor Julianne Schultz AM has recently covered in her influential fortnightly column for The Guardian. She has had an exceptionally eminent and diverse career as a media practitioner, executive, board member, and most recently, academic at Griffith University. Julianne was the publisher and founding editor of the Griffith Review from 2003 to 2021, and is now Professor Emerita, Media and Culture at Griffith.

Among her many senior roles in industry, Julianne was the chair of The Conversation Media Group, and its editorial advisory board before that. She was also chair at the Australian Film TV and Radio School, and has served on the boards of the Copyright Agency, Grattan Institute and Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, where she formerly headed strategy and communications. Earlier in her career, she was a journalist for the Australian Financial Review and Courier-Mail.

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Our first guest, journalist, author, pollster, commentator, and activist Peter Lewis, has written extensively about the lessons from Australia’s Voice referendum for understanding how trust relates to participation in public life, and distrust to disengagement. 

Peter brings a long and varied career of engagement with issues relating to trust. In this episode, he also considers whether our attitudes to digital platforms such as Facebook have been changing over time, and both the potential and the limits of online collective organising. We also consider Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, how Peter found himself on an unexpected unity ticket with Rupert Murdoch, and how AI is challenging our understanding of both trust and truth itself.

Peter was the founding director of the Centre for Responsible Technology, established in 2019 as part of The Australia Institute. He hosts the Burning Platforms podcast and has recently established the Centre of the Public Square, an initiative to build better models of citizen collaboration and strengthen civil society by imagining new methodologies and alternate technologies to anchor this public space, as an initiative of the independent think tank Per Capita. He has also founded Civility Australia, which aims to build a better model of citizen engagement by giving civil society the tools to design and execute compelling collaborations that build a broader community consensus. 

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