2026-09-24T04:38:37Z https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/120314 2023-09-05 col_2142_5131 col_2142_10761 com_2142_5130 com_2142_10755 com_2142_234

Chandrasekharan, Eshwar 2023-05 application/pdf en text Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2023-09-01 without embargo terms The student, Dominic Jones, accepted the attached license on 2023-04-21 at 15:47. The student, Dominic Jones, submitted this Thesis for approval on 2023-04-21 at 15:59. This Thesis was approved for publication on 2023-04-24 at 10:52. DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #19103 on 2023-09-01 at 17:09:21 Measuring epistemic trust: towards a new lens for democratic legitimacy, misinformation, and echo chambers Jones, Dominic Zaun Eu 2023-04-24 Epistemic Trust Social Computing Epistemology Social Epistemology Political Epistemology Misinformation Echo Chambers Democratic Legitimacy Institutional Legitimacy Human-computer Interaction Sociotechnical Systems Trust is crucial for the functioning of complex societies. Testimony, from one speaker to another, underlies many social systems. Epistemic trust, or testimonial credibility, is the likelihood to accept a speaker's claim due to belief on their competence or sincerity. Epistemic trust is closely related to several `pathological epistemic phenomena': democratic (il)legitimacy, the spread of misinformation, and echo chambers. To the best of my knowledge, this theoretical contribution is novel in the field of social computing. I further argue that epistemic trust is no philosophical novelty: it is measurable. Weakly supervised text classification approaches achieve F1 scores of around 80 to 85 per cent on detecting epistemic distrust. This is also, to the best of my knowledge, a novel task in natural language processing. I measure expressions of epistemic distrust across 954 political communities on Reddit. I find that expressions of epistemic distrust are relatively rare, although there are substantial differences between communities. Conspiratorial communities and those focused on controversial political topics tend to express more distrust. Communities with strong epistemic norms enforced by moderation are likely to express low levels. While I find users to be an important potential source of contagion of epistemic distrust, community norms appear to dominate. It is likely that epistemic trust is more useful as an aggregated risk factor. Finally, I argue that policymakers should be aware of epistemic trust considering their reliance on legitimacy underwritten by testimony. Thesis eng https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120314 Copyright 2023 Dominic Zaun Eu Jones M.S. Thesis Computer Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Computer Science