[Commlist] Call for Papers – Amsterdam Trust Summit 2025

Call for Papers – Amsterdam Trust Summit 2025

Don’t miss the chance to contribute to our annual Amsterdam Trust 
Summit, hosted by theTrust in the Digital SocietyResearch Priority Area, 
on August 28–29, 2025!

In recent years trust has become one of the central concepts in the 
digital society. On the one hand, the trustworthiness of our information 
infrastructures, such as platforms, AI, encrypted communications emerged 
as a central concern. On the other hand, trust relations in the digital 
society, such as trust in expertise, science, news, or public 
institutions have been fundamentally disrupted.

We are at a critical juncture, where these two challenges meet. There is 
no rightly vested trust in the digital society without trustworthy 
information-communication technologies. The Amsterdam Trust Summit 
invites researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and activists to come 
together and start building a comprehensive account of the trust 
dynamics in the digital society.

Contributions are welcome for various tracks:

- Theories of trust and distrust in the digital society
- Trust dynamics around emerging technologies
- Individual trusting behaviors and their impacts
- Trustworthiness safeguards of socio-technical infrastructures
- Narratives of trust and distrust in popular culture
- Innovative methods for studying trust in the information age

Submit your work and learn more 
here:https://digitaltrust.uva.nl/amsterdam-trust-summit-2025/call-for-papers-ats-2025.html 
<https://digitaltrust.uva.nl/amsterdam-trust-summit-2025/call-for-papers-ats-2025.html>

Deadline for submissions: February 28, 2025

Trust is the latest shared societal resource to be disrupted by digital 
innovation on a global scale. We see a growing distrust in institutions, 
practices, professions which were highly trusted before. More and more 
people have less confidence than before in journalism, science, 
vaccines, schools and universities, otherwise fair and reliable public 
institutions. Political polarization creates tensions in interpersonal 
trust relations, and sometimes tear friendships, and even families 
apart. While skepticism and distrust can also be understood as liberal 
democratic virtues, online they are all too often subject to 
‘weaponization’ at the hands of trolls, online influencers, lying 
politicians and sock puppet accounts connected to authoritarian state 
sponsored disinformation campaigns. In online environments, where 
outrage often leads to higher levels of 'engagement', these dynamics 
feed into new ‘coalitions of distrust’ forming across and between 
different groups united by their shared antagonism of 'the mainstream'. 
On the other end of the spectrum, we also see an increase of 
‘overconfidence’ in untrustworthy actors. Throughout history, people 
have often placed trust in the wrong hands, but what distinguishes the 
present is the scale at which this occurs online, where accountability 
is frequently lacking. The rise of the sharing economy has made it 
common to trust strangers with our homes, cars, and personal belongings, 
often without fully considering the risks involved. Similarly, the 
growing presence of generative AI has led many to trust the output of 
these systems without hesitation in their daily lives. Trust is fluid, 
and there are just too many opportunities for it to flow into the wrong 
places: the untrustworthy seem to be increasingly trusted, while the 
trustworthy aren’t.

In each case we may be facing a slightly different formulation of the 
same fundamental questions. First: what makes these new digital 
innovations (un)trustworthy? What mix of regulation, transparency, 
accountability, oversights, technical design, business models will 
provide the greatest confidence that our new digital infrastructures can 
deliver on their promises, while keeping the best interest of their 
users and of the society in mind?

Second, how does digital innovation shape trust in the digital society? 
What are the dynamics that shape trust relations vis-à-vis other people, 
institutions, technologies, etc.? How do the different components of 
trust change and transform due to digitization: the circumstances of the 
one who trusts, the characteristics of the one to be trusted, the 
environment in which trust emerges (or not).

Third, what are the (unintended) consequences of the disruption of trust 
relations and the emergence of these new trust mediators to individuals, 
organizations, and society more broadly? And what may be effective 
pathways to, on the one hand, leverage the benefits of some of these 
developments while, on the other hand, addressing the risks and the 
issues that they bring?

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