Flew, Terry. (2020). 'ICA Presidential Address' 70th Annual ICA Conference
https://www.youtube.com/embed/tkdTXwbpAWs
Quote: "But again, the roots of the circulation of conspiracy theories are not necessarily to be found in the conspiracy theories themselves. A focus on trust, and both the sources and the consequences of distrust, can be useful here. Charles Tilly observed that 'trust networks' have been one way in which groups have banded together historically in the face of rulers and institutions that they distrust, and that such groups require stories that bind them together in the face of adversity (Tilly, 2005). It may be that conspiracy theories are one of those integrative devices that bind groups and communities who perceive themselves to be removed from existing elites and power networks. In which case, rather than playing 'whack-a-mole' and trying to drive conspiracy theories off the Internet—which is surely a Sisyphean labour since social media is an archetypal incubator of in-group identities (Flew & Iosifidis, 2020)—we could instead be looking at the factors that are promoting distrust of social, economic and political institutions. Evidence of political and business corruption, lack of accountability and transparency of key institutions, poor governance practices, rising social and economic inequality, a gap between the 'winners' and 'losers' from economic globalization, failure to adequately scrutinize powerful institutions by the media : all suggest themselves as factors that would catalyze rising levels of mistrust, which extends in its outer reaches to conspiracy theories and populist movements" (Flew, T., 2021, p.180). Bibliography: Flew, T. (2020). 'ICA Presidential Address' 70th Annual ICA Conference, Virtual Conference. https://www.icahdq.org/page/annual-conference http://trigg.gr/tag/PhenomnTrustNetworks Flew, T. (2021). 'The Global Trust Deficit Disorder: A Communications Perspective on Trust in the Time of Global Pandemics'. Journal of Communication, 71(2), 163–186. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqab006 Flew, T. (2023). 'Mediated Trust and Artificial Intelligence'. Emerging Media, 1(1), 22-29. https://doi.org/10.1177/27523543231188793 Park, S., Fisher, C., Flew, T., & Dulleck, U. (2020). 'Global Mistrust in News: The Impact of Social Media on Trust'. International Journal on Media Management, 22(2), 83-96. https://doi.org/10.1080/14241277.2020.1799794 Tilly, C. (2004). 'Trust and Rule. Theory and Society', 33(1), 1–30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4144889 Enli, G. (2015). 'Mediated Authenticity: How the Media Constructs Reality'. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-1-4539-1458-8 Review : https://www.scup.com/doi/10.18261/issn.0805-9535-2016-01-11 Flew, T. (2026, May 22). 'Why we are not in a post-truth era'. Media@LSE Promoting Critical Research into the Vital Role of Media and Communications in Contemporary Society. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/medialse/2026/05/22/why-we-are-not-in-a-post-truth-era/
