Seriously. Who?

Because I’ve never actually met such a person.

At the beginning, in the ’90s, there was a lot of trust.

It was new. People were just learning to express themselves.

Then there was little trust.

It quickly filled with swamp and opinion.

And then people started to do amazing things. Like Wikipedia and Huffpo. Organized, networked, and verified.

So trust is relative.

Believe

Nobody has ever actually believed you can trust anything because it was on the internet. But today, plenty of people believe you can trust nothing on the internet. Many distrust the internet out of hand.

What has always dogged our pursuit of truth (terrestrial and virtual) is the discriminatory impulse to pick and choose what to believe.

But distrust of the entire institution, like all institutions, is as naive and small-minded as that ridiculous idea:

That anyone trusts it because it’s the internet.

Literally no one does.

No, we trust specific parts of the internet because they are peer-reviewed and verified. Because the domain-ownership is secure and it’s a trusted brand. Or because journalists we trust are staking their reputations on it.

I don’t trust or distrust anything because it’s on the internet.

I trust the person who wrote it, the institutions who fund it, and the researchers who do the legwork. Trust isn’t about the medium, but the messenger.