From California Magazine
Building Trust: A Q&A with Professor Coye Cheshire on Social Media, Misinformation and Political Activism
By Nathalia Alcantara
From real-time raw images of war to the sight of Pope Francis wearing an AI-generated puffer coat, social media content pulls us in every direction. In this sea of information, the line between reality and the distortions of our digital echo chambers has never been blurrier. Despite its undeniable benefits in democratizing information, social media’s fragmented reality forces us to question whether anything we see online is real.
The quandaries of online trust have intrigued Berkeley School of Information Professor Coye Cheshire since the 1990s, back in the early days of online marketplaces such as eBay. “At that time, the idea of conducting online social and financial transactions with other people was still novel, unproven, and quite risky,” he says.
One day, as he helped his parents buy some crafts online and wondered whether the seller would actually send the promised items, he found a new focus for his work. Cheshire’s mixed-methods research explores the intricacies of how people build trust and cooperate in online environments—a complicated dynamic today, to say the least...
Coye Cheshire is a professor at the I School researching sociological social psychology and group processes, with a focus in social exchange, cooperation, and trust in technology-mediated environments.
