VISUAL TRUST ON SOCIAL MEDIA – MEANING, MONEY AND MOTIVATION

Abstract

This decade has been characterized by a deep crisis of trust and legitimacy, which is linked in complex ways to digital technologies and modes of communication. This panel focuses on the role of visuality in trust. It starts from the premise that images are increasingly used to express reliability and trustworthiness, increase engagement in online environments, while also being met with increasing suspicion across platforms. We propose five linked papers that explore how visual digital trust is experienced and made sense of by social media users, content creators and platforms. We are finding that trust is often too abstract for social media users to be able to address directly, rather it is experienced and articulated via norms and practices of (in)authenticity, relatability, coherence, credibility, authority. Thus, our papers focus on these various aspects, experiences and components of visual digital trust moving from perceptions of in/authenticity (paper 1) and social media users’ practices of distributed seeing at its service (paper 2), to users perceptions of creators’ commercial motivations and how that intersects with trust (paper 3), to questions of embodied trust in representations of gym bodies (paper 4) and finally the negotiations of trustworthiness in the context of YouTube’s “Health” program (paper 5).