Beyond McLuhan, Why the AI Era Requires Communicators to Rethink Trust

It is easy to fall into the trap of looking at issues one-dimensionally. 

When it comes to building trust, communicators need to consider at least three dimensions. The first two are well-understood, the third dimension is not. 

For a communications audience it goes without saying that building a strong reputation – a measure of collective past and current actions, media coverage, and how companies engage with clients and the media, is a key driver of trust. In this context, public relations, communications, and marketing content all contribute directly to trust. Trust is the key to unlocking client and consumer engagement and ultimately desired behaviors.  

For the second dimension we need to look to Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the “Medium is the Message.” For McLuhan, the medium is more important than the content it carries. The vehicles for communication - TV, newspapers, blogs, email or social media - will all be experienced differently. Trust in content is shaped by the underlying media.     

The third dimension is an emerging challenge – technology or system-based trust. The starting point is to ask what happens if the medium is no longer trusted? 

With the rise of misinformation, disinformation, AI-generated content, and digital fraud, the world has changed. This year marked the first time AI content exceeded human-generated content on the web. In the coming year, more than 90% of content on the internet is anticipated to be AI generated, with fraud and “shadow content” increasing at a rapid rate. Putting this in context, a Pew Research study shows that 73% of Americans have been subject to cyberattacks, much of which is based on content designed to look as though it is authentic and get consumers to act on it. 

These experiences are leading more Americans to question the veracity of what they see and receive. This tracks with data showing a significant ongoing decline in trust in digital content. This is not driven by the content companies, communicators and marketers create, or the mediums or media through which it is shared, but a fundamental erosion of trust in the systems underpinning them.       

In today’s digital landscape there’s so much misleading and fraudulent content, that audiences are questioning trusted media organizations, press releases, corporate communications and social media posts, as well as the provenance of what they see and receive. 

Communicators may believe this as an issue beyond their control. It is not. 

Recognizing the existential nature of the loss of trust in the systems that underpin both content and the mediums through which it is communicated, leading technology and media companies have been developing an approach to maintain and restore it. 

Content authentication has emerged as a foundational technology to address the issue of knowing the “who” and “where” of content origination. Once companies authenticate content using these new tools, recipients can verify provenance. This is a fundamental shift in the digital landscape. 

It is important to recognize that content authentication does not prevent bad actors from automating the production of fake or manipulated content. With the widespread adoption of AI and agentic tools, this war has been lost. 

What authentication does at a system level is help users differentiate between what is real and fake, and what can and cannot be trusted, as well as enable search engines, LLMs, social media and aggregators to prioritize the distribution of authentic content. A good parallel was the shift from “http” to “https” with websites. Content authentication integrates this type of identity-based security at the level of individual pieces of content. 

Communicators build reputation and trust in brands through content. Choosing trusted media outlets to leverage the trust of the publisher or medium remains vital. In the rapidly changing digital landscape, building the trust anchor of credentials into content is foundational for both approaches to continue to work. If we are to ensure that the high-value content the communications industry produces will be trusted and acted upon - content authentication will be essential. 

As communicators will be well-aware, the fundamental challenge misinformation is that audiences lose the ability to know what to trust – even that which is trustworthy. A fake text that seems to be from your bank, for example, leads to the questioning of all content as well as the medium or platform through which it is shared. 

A foundation for McLuhan’s idea of the medium being more important than content is that the medium is trusted. This requires communicators to incorporate the third dimension of systems and technology to efforts to build trust and reputation. Content authentication will be one of the key technologies to address this 21st century challenge.