Trust, election interference and coordinated inauthentic behavior

Trust and trustworthiness have been researched for decades in political science, but how are trust perceptions shaped by changes in technology, its utilization and our understanding of their consequences? This paper departs from a relatively new phenomenon, the utilization of coordinated inauthentic behavior (bots, trolls and hybrids: CIB) on social media platforms. CIB has received an increasing medial and academic attention over the last couple of years, and are often described and understood as inauthentic accounts deployed at mass in order to control and shape online public debate and opinion through the (de)amplification of certain political narratives and actors as well as the spread of disinformation and perceived conflict online – very often in relation to democratic elections. The most high-profile case of reported CIB use in relation to elections is the campaign linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency and its involvement in the 2016 US presidential election. However, an interesting reflection looking back on this campaign has been that it “may have had its largest effects by convincing Americans that its campaign was successful” (Eady et al. 2023) by the “generalization of disorientation and delegitimation of institutions represented by… the debate over election interference” (Benkler 2019, para. 2) rather than in the direct effect it had in and by itself. Departing from this reflection, this study investigates how trust relationships and perceptions are affected by this narrative of CIB as interfering in our democratic processes. This study is constructed as a survey experiment with British respondents, where they are exposed to a fictive news article about potential CIB interference in the British general election of 2019. This means that the paper broadly investigates the causal links that ties CIB election interference information to three forms of trust: trust in media platforms and news, trust in political institutions as well as generalized trust. Data-collection will take place in the beginning of the year, and analyses and conclusions should be in place well in advance before the workshop. The study fits the paper request of this workshop by: 1) Having a heavy focus on political trust (as well as other forms of trust relationships), where political trust is put in a contemporary technological and media context. 2) By exploring political trust through both classical attitudinal measures, as well as proposing and testing alternative measurements trying to capture a more behavioral measure of each of the types of trust explored. 3) By exploring the relationship between trust and democratic attitudes and legitimacy by looking at consequences of the undermining of perceptions of electoral integrity and legitimacy in the context of social media and news sources of technology. References: - Benkler, Yochai. 2019. Social Science Research Council, MediaWell Cautionary Notes on Disinformation and the Origins of Distrust. New York. https://mediawell.ssrc.org/expert-reflections/cautionary-notes-on-disinformation-benkler/. - Eady, Gregory et al. 2023. “Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency Foreign Influence Campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US Election and Its Relationship to Attitudes and Voting Behavior.” Nature Communications 14(1).