The Edelman Trust survey revealed an "unprecedented crisis of confidence" in the United States and 22 countries. The reason; the Fake News.
His failure Facebook, Google and Twitter to address the damaging effects of Fake News has created a lot of distrust in social media platforms, search engines and news apps, reports the Edelman Trust Barometer 2018, a survey of more than 33.000 people from 28 countries.
But confidence in journalism has improved significantly. So today, there seems to be a huge gap between each media platform and much improved journalism.
Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman, the largest private public relations firm, said that because of Fake News, there was "an unprecedented crisis of confidence in the United States."
"It is the first time that a huge drop of trust is not linked to a pressing economic issue or a disaster such as the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In fact, it's the ultimate irony as it's happening at a time of prosperity, with the US stock market and employment rates at record highs. The cause of this decline is due to the lack of objective news and rational discourse.”
False news and the inability of social media platforms and search engines to cope with them created a series of confidence loss situations in most of the countries that participated in the survey.
This is a big phenomenon with potentially high long-term costs for social media platforms. Shares of Facebook fell more than 6% when they announced they would stop showing a lot of news on users' feeds - which implied that no mechanical solution could be found.
Edelman's research found that a large number of people (63%) said they could not trust facebook's plan to find out if a story comes from a reliable journalistic source. However, people's confidence in journalism and journalists rose double-digit, the largest of all accusations.
Edelman says the global crisis of confidence can only be addressed by the business community. Almost two-thirds of respondents expect CEOs to change policy and will not wait for government action. Businesses have much higher credit ratings than government institutions.
… building trust (69 percent) is now the priority for CEOs, surpassing new generation productof and services high quality (68 percent) ….
Technological businesses are the most trusted industries (but not the social media platforms) at 75%. Education 70%. 68% professional services, and financial services with a percentage of 54%.
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