Trust: a XXII century’s bet

This article is written by Giulia Porcu, a WES 2026 student journalist and writer for Le Dragon Déchaîné.

Trust doesn’t follow a script. 

The longstanding ethic of information—once anchored in professional journalism and institutional closure—has been systematically eroded and diminished.

No longer circulating through newspapers and editorial firms, facts currently flow through new informational platforms, owned -or perhaps created- by dominating political and economic actors whose influence and success are a derivative of successful fabrication and perpetuation of distorted realities.  Knowledge becomes frictionless. Reliability becomes scarce. Scarcity creates value. 

Daniel Treisman and Sergei Guriev’s analysis of authoritarian rule’s redesignation- developed in their book “Spin Dictators: the Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century”- emblematically portrays the rise of ‘spin dictators’, describing how such rulers control their citizens by distorting information and simulating democratic procedures. Ultimately this theory solves some of the greatest current political puzzles - from how dictators survive in a globalized and modern era to the disturbing convergence and mutual sympathy with influential populists.

Keynote address by Jon Slade at WES2026

Addressing the same problem of information’s distortion, Jon Slade - Chief Executive Officer of the Financial Times- suffused the Warwick Economic Summit on Friday, 6 February 2026, with distinct tones of optimism and positivity, opening proceedings with a realistic yet hopeful address on the challenges and prospects facing the public service mission of independent journalism: that is of the highest quality and information that upholds the best standards of impartiality. Discussing the structural strains that digital platforms and generative AI impose on the information landscape, the journalist contended that the genuine danger resides more in the economic model driven by attention than in the technology itself, which prioritizes speed and engagement over fact-checking.

According to Slade, AI thus serves as both an enhancer of disarray and a possible impetus prompting news organizations to re-establish credibility as their core principle. When asked, from a skeptical attendee, if he still had hope in AI as a truth-based system, with a quizzical smile and spark in his eyes he stated: “I have to have hope. I have to be an optimist. I have to use my position to try and shape some of that [...]. I still sense that there is an inherent market for people who want to understand what they should trust, and is this true? Because the world is really confusing, and if you find it confusing one of the ways that you can solve that confusion is to engage in dialogue, the other is to come to places that you trust and help people piece that together. So I'm definitely an optimist that there is a consumer market for truth and for trust”. 

Undeniably, it is through the lens of this  ‘double T’ market that I analysed the growing crisis of global credibility, an issue addressed by Oleksandra Matviichuk, Ukrainian lawyer, activist and Nobel Prize winner. Identifying a systemic fracture in the widening gap between declared principles and enacted responsibilities, the speaker moved beyond the problem of trust solely in dictatorships and questioned the coherence of democratic societies and international institutions whose failure to uphold the same universal principles they praise and proclaim is staggering. How many have already lost faith not only in authorities but in the very architecture of international law due to this lack of credibility otherwise known as hypocrisy? Justice requires trust in reality itself but “when truth becomes relative, crimes become possible”. 

Against this denunciation of distorted reality and broken moral commitments, the core of the discussion shifts from the political to the informational realm. If ‘Spin Dictators’ perpetuate tyrannic regimes by distorting facts, are there any effective checks and balances to technological and economic incentives that could eventually lead to similar practices in democratic societies? It is at this very intersection - not censorship but attention - that Jon Slade identifies the rising crisis of trust. His emphasis on truth deprioritization fostered by modern media is emblematic; ultimately algorithms reward engagement, not reliability, and consequently reshaped what citizens perceive as truth. Nevertheless he was quick to dismantle excessively pessimistic assumptions: “ Research from the Pew Center tells us that a quarter of adults in the US use AI services to access news, and that number is growing as overall AI usage increases. But at the same time, a UNESCO report found that 87% of people are concerned about online misinformation, and two-thirds of adults say they're highly concerned about people getting inaccurate results from AI tools. And here in the UK, nearly half of the public believe AI will make online news less trustworthy. Now, I think that's remarkable, because it suggests that optimism about technology has curdled into anxiety, and perhaps you share some of those concerns. And it's not because people are technophobic. It's because they're observant. They've seen what happens when new platforms arrive without rules. The echo chambers, the fake accounts, the viral lies that travel faster than the corrections. They've seen what happens when attention becomes the currency of the realm, rather than trust”. 

 It follows that journalism’s core mission to ‘give people enough truth to think for themselves’ is not solely limited to this field, but encompasses the economic and democratic realm as well. When information is reliable markets function best, when citizens can tell the difference between ‘signal and noise’ democracies function best. In the upcoming years lies an awaiting bet for each of us: will we be able to build wiser markets and ultimately wiser societies? 

The views and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Warwick Economics Summit.