Measuring epistemic trust: towards a new lens for democratic legitimacy, misinformation, and echo chambers

Jones, Dominic Zaun Eu

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120314 Copy

Description

Title

Measuring epistemic trust: towards a new lens for democratic legitimacy, misinformation, and echo chambers

Author(s)

Jones, Dominic Zaun Eu

Issue Date

2023-04-24

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Chandrasekharan, Eshwar

Department of Study

Computer Science

Discipline

Computer Science

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

M.S.

Degree Level

Thesis

Keyword(s)

• epistemic trust
• social computing
• epistemology
• social epistemology
• political epistemology
• misinformation
• echo chambers
• democratic legitimacy
• institutional legitimacy
• human-computer interaction
• sociotechnical systems

Abstract

Trust is crucial for the functioning of complex societies. Testimony, from one speaker to another, underlies many social systems. Epistemic trust, or testimonial credibility, is the likelihood to accept a speaker's claim due to belief on their competence or sincerity. Epistemic trust is closely related to several `pathological epistemic phenomena': democratic (il)legitimacy, the spread of misinformation, and echo chambers. To the best of my knowledge, this theoretical contribution is novel in the field of social computing. I further argue that epistemic trust is no philosophical novelty: it is measurable. Weakly supervised text classification approaches achieve F1 scores of around 80 to 85 per cent on detecting epistemic distrust. This is also, to the best of my knowledge, a novel task in natural language processing. I measure expressions of epistemic distrust across 954 political communities on Reddit. I find that expressions of epistemic distrust are relatively rare, although there are substantial differences between communities. Conspiratorial communities and those focused on controversial political topics tend to express more distrust. Communities with strong epistemic norms enforced by moderation are likely to express low levels. While I find users to be an important potential source of contagion of epistemic distrust, community norms appear to dominate. It is likely that epistemic trust is more useful as an aggregated risk factor. Finally, I argue that policymakers should be aware of epistemic trust considering their reliance on legitimacy underwritten by testimony.

Graduation Semester

2023-05

Type of Resource

Thesis

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2023 Dominic Zaun Eu Jones

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