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Journalists are supposed to comport themselves according to specific ethical standards, but those standards can seem at odds with societal norms-telling other people’s secrets, for example, or being impertinent to powerful people. Unlike most trustworthy institutions, journalism isn’t supposed to reaffirm worldviews. But for most of us it gets expressed in a way that reaffirms our worldview.” “What is trust or trustworthiness of a source? We don’t have a universal definition, even though we all understand the underlying concept. We choose a news source because it reinforces our pre-existing beliefs,” Kearney says. (WIRED didn’t appear on the list.) “Maybe in a highly salient political time, any type of controversy drives us to the more confirmatory. Most trusted: Reuters, public television, and The Economist. At the bottom: Buzzfeed, Breitbart, social media, and Infowars.

Kearney also asked about specific outlets, which may offer a preview of the Facebook newsfeed bump. Seventy-five percent of Americans say the news media does fairly well or very well at keeping them informed, but that splits on party lines, too-88-69 Democratic. Similarly, a Pew Research Center study from May 2017 said that 89 percent of people who identified as Democrats said the news media’s watchdog role kept politicians from doing bad things, compared with just 42 percent of Republicans. It’s safe to assume that people who bottom out on all those metrics still trust some sources of information, and presumably they’d upvote those on the Facebook survey. This was before political polarization reached its current supercharged levels, and the survey asked about the news in general rather than particular sources. Using data from an ongoing multi-subject survey out of the University of Michigan, a 2010 study in the journal American Behavioral Scientist said that three things predicted whether someone will trust the news media: how far they leaned to the left, politically how trusting they are in general and how well they think the economy is doing. Here’s the even deeper problem: Not only do people not trust the media much in general, but their level of trust emerges predictably from their political orientation. “Their local church, local institutions, local paper, their friends.” (Apparently people share news on Facebook with friends somewhat indiscriminately an experiment where Facebook fact-checkers marked some stories as “disputed” didn’t cut sharing rates, though appending related news did-somewhat.) “A lot of people have a very local view of what they trust,” says Roderick Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford. They’ll distrust an expert but believe a friend or loved one. Worse, people tend to be more trusting of things that are familiar.

“Saying that you’re using a legitimate, well-known process, but not actually doing that.” “The legitimacy part is the one that gets gamed the most,” says Kimberly Elsbach, a professor of management at UC Davis. Of course, the appearance of trustworthiness can be gamed. “Members of a community may trust one another in ways that are commonly all to the good, and yet their trust may enable them to subjugate and brutalize a neighboring community,” he writes.

People trust other people and things for all sorts of bad reasons, Hardin points out, to do all sorts of bad things. It should matter whether that news outlet is trustworthy. What Facebook seems to be asking about is not actually trust but trustworthiness-because, frankly, it should not matter whether someone trusts a news outlet. What does Facebook think its users trust news organizations to do? The company did not respond to requests for comment. When it comes to news, solving for X is the tricky part.