I think the issue goes beyond just trust. The problems I refer to just in case you don't want to read each blog post are:
- Attention scarcity. Attention is a scarce resource yet current social media acts as if it's unlimited. This presents a problem.
- Involuntary ignorance. Even if some of us desire to be wise we simply don't have the means to hope to do it. The human brain is very limited in it's ability to process information. No matter what my IQ is it's not going to let me process big data. Yet the world (society) becomes increasingly complex every year and the responsibility on me as an individual increases each year in terms of changing social norms/public sentiment, changing laws (and more laws), a greater number of relationships to manage.
- Biological limit to social intelligence. No matter how responsible I desire to be, it is never going to be possible for me to escape the fact that my brain is designed to handle maybe 150 relationships. Yet in the society of today we are expected to manage thousands, millions of relationships. If a person posts something controversial on social media and they have 10,000 followers there is no way their brain can be expected to manage the expectations of 10,000 people with different morals, different cultures, different sentiment. As a result anyone who speaks eventually will be held accountable in ways we cannot predict yet by people who feel a certain way which we might not understand.
All of these problems in my blog I show trace back to neuroscience. The biological limits of the brain mean that wisdom (and morality) doesn't scale. So having greater transparency without wisdom and without capacity to be moral is likely a disaster. I also mention that the idea that we should create a sort of small town atmosphere also can't scale if the human brain is only capable of managing 150 relationships, so the metaphor of small town on something like Steem can't work because a community traditionally is 150 people not 1 million people or 10,000 people like we see online.
Fake sockpuppets, fake communications, etc, these are side effect problems that result from the biological limits. Because I don't have the ability to examine everyone to determine who I can trust then it's just a flood of information coming at me. It will only get worse until we develop an ability to filter and an exocortex (the concept I describe) can help with this.