#social-trust — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #social-trust, aggregated by home.social.
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When Vulnerability Meets Extraction
Cliff Potts, editor-in-chief, WPS News
Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — April 25, 2026 — 4:05 p.m.Last week I wrote about extraction — the growing habit of taking more than we give.
This week, I need to make it personal.
There was a period when my wife was dying. Anyone who has lived through that knows what it does to the mind. You are grieving before the loss. You are lonely before you are alone. Your thinking is not steady. It is in survival mode.
During that time, a strange agreement was discussed between me and someone else. It was not a traditional relationship. It was more like a future arrangement built around money and companionship. The idea only came up because I was afraid of being alone. I was trying to soften what felt unbearable.
The agreement was talked about. It was not denied. Later, when reality settled in, it quietly disappeared.
No follow-through. No clear conversation. Just distance.
I am not writing this to attack anyone. People panic. People say things they do not fully mean. People change their minds. That is human.
But here is where the pattern becomes troubling.
When someone is vulnerable — grieving, unstable, frightened — that is not the moment to build financial arrangements around emotional connection.
That is not companionship. That is leverage.
There was also something else that surprised me.
When I eventually stepped back and did not continue sending money, there was no honest discussion. Instead, there was anger and withdrawal. Silence. Distance. As if I had failed to meet an obligation that was never clearly defined.
That confusion matters.
When money and emotion get tangled, expectations grow in the shadows. One person thinks it is companionship. The other may see it as income. When those expectations collide, resentment follows.
But resentment without clarity erodes trust.
If companionship exists only while payment flows, that is a transaction. If the connection disappears when the payment stops, that reveals the structure underneath.
And that structure is not built on mutual care.
We are seeing more of this pattern in modern culture.
Attention for money.
Affection for payment.
Access for subscription.Adults are free to make agreements. Freedom matters.
But we should still ask a simple question: is everything meant to be a market?
If companionship becomes something you rent by the month, what happens to sincerity? What happens to trust? What happens to simple decency?
Yes, you can pay for digital interaction. There are apps. There are subscription platforms. There are even artificial companions that simulate conversation for a monthly fee.
But simulated connection is not the same as shared humanity.
It may fill silence.
It does not build meaning.When emotional vulnerability becomes a business model, we cross from transaction into extraction.
There is a difference between honest work and emotional leverage.
If two adults clearly agree on terms and both understand them, that is one thing. But if one person is in crisis and the other sees opportunity — even unintentionally — something deeper breaks.
This is not about shaming individuals. It is about drawing ethical boundaries.
When someone is grieving, we show up.
We do not price the moment.When someone is afraid, we support them.
We do not build a billing system around their fear.We do not rebuild society by pretending this is normal.
Companionship is not a subscription service.
Care is not a pay-per-view feature.
Grief is not a revenue stream.If we want stronger communities, we must protect human connection from becoming just another marketplace.
Not everything that can be sold should be sold.
Some things still need to remain human.
#Accountability #digitalRelationships #emotionalEconomy #ethics #grief #onlineCulture #personalBoundaries #socialTrust -
Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/articles/10.3389/fpos.2026.1779810/full
#HackerNews #Corruption #SocialTrust #Democracies #Autocracies #PoliticalScience
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2026: Jeder Mensch besitzt nun einen dynamischen Score, berechnet aus Konsumverhalten, Sprache, Gesundheitsdaten, Kontakten und „gesellschaftlicher Konformität“. Ein niedriger Wert führt zu längeren Wartezeiten, schlechteren Kreditkonditionen oder eingeschränktem Zugang zu Dienstleistungen. Offiziell ist der Score „nur eine Empfehlung“. Inoffiziell entscheidet er über dein Leben.
#socialtrust #SocialTrustScore #bewertungssysteme #konsumverhalten #gesundheitsdaten #finanzdaten #verhaltensbasiert #entscheidung #rating #profiling #algorithmen #ki #ai #databroker
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Europeans still want climate action, but don't trust governments to deliver
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Great data and lots of inspiration. I looked up my own ZIP code and found, not surprisingly, that Somerville ranks very high on public spaces where we can connect, and almost as high on attitudes, though less on actual participation.
https://trust.weavers.org/ #socialtrust #community -
Trumpists and Social Dishonesty
The UnPopulist, where I host the Zooming In podcast, as well as have republished a good number of transcripts of my ReImagining Liberty episodes, has released its first major survey of Americans’ populist views. It’s well worth your time to read, with a ton of interesting findings beyond the core takeaway of “full-blown populists comprising about 10.3% of Trump’s support and about 2.5% of Biden’s.” (And if you subscribe to The UnPopulist newsletter—it’s free!—or the Zooming In podcast, you’ll get to hear my in-depth interview with the survey’s author next week.)
But I wanted to highlight the one finding I found perhaps the most interesting. It’s certainly the most stark.
When asked, “Do you think your wallet (or your valuables) would be returned to you if it were found by a stranger?,” just 16.5% of Trump populists said yes—less than half the percentage of all Americans who said the same (34.0%). The Trump populists’ level of trust was lower than that of other Trump supporters and of any major subgroup we reviewed, whether by gender, age, race, income or political party. It was also distinct from the trust level of Biden supporters and Biden populists, 40.5% and 47.8% of whom, respectively, said yes to the same question—significantly more than all Americans.
That’s an enormous difference. And not just that Trumpist populists dramatically less likely to believe a stranger would return their wallet as the typical American, but that the most hardcore Biden supporters are dramatically more likely than the typical American to think a strange would come through for them.
Why might this be? I can see two obvious possibilities, which aren’t necessarily exclusive.
The first take is that the most Trumpy of the Trumpists could live in towns that are, in fact, generally less honest than the rest of America. Maybe these areas are populated by people more likely to steal. Or maybe these Trumpists are themselves less honest, and assuming everyone else is, too. (“I know I wouldn’t return a stranger’s wallet…”) In other words, maybe there are features of the kinds of places that are drawn to Trump that also manifest as a greater likelihood of dishonesty. This is the “Trumpists are members of a broken culture” interpretation.
The second take–and, again, both could simultaneously be true–is that a feature of the most Trumpy of the Trumpists is that they consume a ton of far-right media and a consistent feature of far-right media is the message that the world outside your door, and especially the world of people even marginally different from you, is a scary, dangerous, apocalyptic place. So, yes, if you dropped your wallet somewhere on your own block, your Trumpy neighbor would return it to you, but if you dropped it enough blocks over that it’s where they live, then it’s gone–and that’s if you even manage to make it out of there unscathed.
I don’t know which it is, and I suspect it’s a good bit of both. But the upshot is that, if liberalism depends upon the view that we are capable of living together in peace and some degree of mutual support, then Trump’s populist base are skeptical of the very possibility of such a positively interdependent world. That’s not good.
#rightWing #socialTrust #trumpism
https://aaronrosspowell.com/blog/trumpists-and-social-dishonesty/
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The importance of social trust for climate resilience really resonates with me. I'm blessed to live in such a community. I also think journalism and media have a role to play in building social trust, not wearing it down. https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/where-should-i-live #socialtrust #climate #communities #resilience #journalism
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The #GreatDeluge Has Begun! 🌊
A tsunami of #ai-generated content from #ChatGPT, #Bard, #BingAI, #StableDiffusion, & #Midjourney is washing over the Internet.
It's time we start discussing the implication for #SocialTrust, #Democracy, #InfoSec, #Privacy, #InformationPollution, etc.
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@witchescauldron
"Trustless", as it relates to crypto, is a social trust, its just distilled to a single word for brevity.For example the bitcoiner doesn't need to trust a single point because those can fail for any reason, not just malevolence. So there's a big community working together to use simple #mathematics to maintain that part of the social fabric that is the #ledger.
Things a community value together form part of a common social fabric.