{"id":{"repo_id":"uiuc","oai_identifier":"oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/120314"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/uiuc/oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/120314","repository":{"repo_id":"uiuc","name":"University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign","base_url":"https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh"},"display":{"title":"Measuring epistemic trust: towards a new lens for democratic legitimacy, misinformation, and echo chambers","abstract":"Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2023-09-01 without embargo terms","abstract_html":"Submission original under an indefinite embargo labeled 'Open Access'. The submission was exported from vireo on 2023-09-01 without embargo terms","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Jones, Dominic Zaun Eu"],"institution":"University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign","degree_name":"M.S.","degree_level":"Thesis","degree_discipline":"Computer Science","degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Chandrasekharan, Eshwar"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2023,"date_issued":"2023-05","date_published":"2023-05","updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:24:57Z","subjects":["Epistemic Trust","Social Computing","Epistemology","Social Epistemology","Political Epistemology","Misinformation","Echo Chambers","Democratic Legitimacy","Institutional Legitimacy","Human-computer Interaction","Sociotechnical Systems"],"languages":["en","eng"],"rights":["Copyright 2023 Dominic Zaun Eu Jones"],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120314","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Chandrasekharan, Eshwar"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Jones, Dominic Zaun Eu"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2023-05","2023-04-24"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["text","Thesis"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_discipline","label":"Discipline","values":["Computer Science"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_level","label":"Degree Level","values":["Thesis"]},{"key":"thesis:degree_name","label":"Degree Name","values":["M.S."]},{"key":"thesis:institution_name","label":"Thesis Institution Name","values":["University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["Epistemic Trust","Social Computing","Epistemology","Social Epistemology","Political Epistemology","Misinformation","Echo Chambers","Democratic Legitimacy","Institutional Legitimacy","Human-computer Interaction","Sociotechnical Systems"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["en","eng"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["Copyright 2023 Dominic Zaun Eu Jones"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120314"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["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","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."]},{"key":"dc:format","label":"Dc Format","values":["application/pdf"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["Measuring epistemic trust: towards a new lens for democratic legitimacy, misinformation, and echo chambers"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor":["Chandrasekharan, Eshwar"],"dc:creator":["Jones, Dominic Zaun Eu"],"dc:date":["2023-05","2023-04-24"],"dc:description":["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","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."],"dc:format":["application/pdf"],"dc:identifier":["https://hdl.handle.net/2142/120314"],"dc:language":["en","eng"],"dc:rights":["Copyright 2023 Dominic Zaun Eu Jones"],"dc:subject":["Epistemic Trust","Social Computing","Epistemology","Social Epistemology","Political Epistemology","Misinformation","Echo Chambers","Democratic Legitimacy","Institutional Legitimacy","Human-computer Interaction","Sociotechnical Systems"],"dc:title":["Measuring epistemic trust: towards a new lens for democratic legitimacy, misinformation, and echo chambers"],"dc:type":["text","Thesis"],"thesis:degree_discipline":["Computer Science"],"thesis:degree_level":["Thesis"],"thesis:degree_name":["M.S."],"thesis:institution_name":["University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-22T22:24:57Z"}