Content Creation in the Time of Disinformation: A Pathway to Trust

“Easy to process equates to easy to believe.” These words leaped off the page as I was rereading David Dylan Thomas’ book Design for Cognitive Bias recently. They apply to the gamut of modern deliberative information-making (short- and long-form) from ad slogans to instruction manuals. They also inform deliberately deceptive content—manipulative and fact-free social media posts, press releases, and political speeches—or disinformation.

As my mind began to grasp the far-reaching implications of this quotation, I realized that it also speaks indirectly to the central construct in successful product communication: trust.

As professional communicators, how can we earn our audience’s trust? How can we appeal to readers who are potentially adrift in a disinformation-polluted social environment?

In this blog post, I offer some insights into that context and some suggestions for a pathway for building trust with our audiences.

Cognitive Frames and Mindsets

A look into the psychology of sensemaking and interpretation can help us understand the communication bubbles—or frames—our audiences sometimes move into and out of. First, some definitions.

The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public (CIP) offers us these terms:

• Frames are “the mental schema that shape how people interpret that evidence.”
• Collective sensemaking is “a process of the interactions between evidence and frames”; that process is interactive and includes interpretations and framing.
• Framing, which both readers and communicators—including influencers—engage in, is “the process of using, building, reinforcing, adapting, challenging, and updating frames.”
• Disinformation is “the intentional manipulation of the sensemaking process, either by introducing false evidence or distorting the frames through which people interpret the evidence.”

In other words, our words and visuals interact with our audience’s mental frames and engage the audience in a sensemaking process. But this process doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

Our audiences, thanks to social media and cable television, are constantly bombarded with words, visuals, and “facts” from other sources. That’s where framing comes in; as the audience drinks from the firehose, they are, theoretically, checking evidence against a frame (or two) and, hopefully, adapting or updating that frame (or two).

Or not.

Cognitive psychologist Ruth Mayo asserts that two distinct mindsets play a role in disinformation. A mindset is a “cognitive orientation and procedures applied to a particular task.” Mindsets seem to trump framing during content interpretation.

Here’s how that works. As we encounter new content, we apply a trust or distrust mindset, according to Mayo.

She warns that many of us think disinformation is rooted in a default mindset of trust; in other words, we think people believe the messages in front of them unconditionally even when the content is factually wrong. But this explanation is too simple and so is believing that the distrust mindset is the root of disinformation. She explains that the distrust mindset can be both a cause and a cure for disinformation (Current Opinion in Psychology, December 2023).

Suddenly writing easy-to-process content doesn’t seem so simple anymore.

Context of Distrust in Institutions

To add a historical (U.S.) context to the challenge of the distrust mindset, look at some recent Gallup Polling results shared by Ari Melber on his show “The Beat” (Feb. 20, 2025) and found in detail on the Gallup website. The results show that public distrust in U.S. institutions is at an all-time low:

• Trust in the U.S. Supreme Court declined from 50% in 2001 to 30% in 2024.
• Trust in business (as an institution) declined from 28% in 2001 to 16% in 2024.
• Trust in higher education (universities) dropped 20 points, from 56% in 2014 to 36% in 2024 (WSJ, Feb 25, 2025).
• Overall trust in major U.S. institutions declined from 43% in 2001 to 28% in 2024.

Melber notes that while the American public rebounded from a recession (and tension over the election of George H. W. Bush), their trust in American institutions did not. Melber’s guest on that day, Chris Hayes, asserts that distrust in the elites and Washington now correlates with distrust in experts in general: People are saying “If those are your experts, we don’t want them.”

Most of us can guess that repetition and online echo chambers have played a role in this disaffection. The authors of “Misinformation and the epistemic integrity of democracy” (Current Opinion in Psychology, December 2023) provide some data on this point:

Their “content analysis of 16,000 documents produced by think tanks has revealed that the relative prevalence of statements casting doubt on mainstream science has increased between 1998 and 2013.” They call this phenomenon “organized disinformation.”

Another set of psychologists, Di Momenico and Ding, writing about brand trust and disinformation, also pointed to organized disinformation as particularly damaging. They first note that consumer trust in brands has been subject to “indirect misinformation,” which they describe as less explicit but still polluting to the brand “ecosystem” (Current Opinion in Psychology, November 2023). However, they remind us that our brand information can be subjected to “direct misinformation” in the form of fake news and fake reviews.

Recovery from these targeted campaigns can be “context-dependent” and take some planning. Rebuilding trust is essential. But they conclude that brand trust has a “multidimensional nature,” and further study is needed.  

Pathway to Trust

Given that we work in an ecosystem of direct and indirect misinformation, our efforts to build trust in product communications must also be multi-dimensional. We can still seek innovation; however, safeguarding brand equity should be central to our strategy.

I see five stepping stones on the pathway to trust;

1—Storytelling

Psychologists Di Momenico and Ding, in their research, found that whatever else we do to promote or defend our brand, presenting “a narrative approach that appeals to authenticity and emotion” will almost always enhance the effectiveness of our efforts.

To have authenticity and emotion, a narrative (story) must have a relatable central character whose journey toward a goal is compelling. I wrote about effective storytelling in my blog post “A Guide to Storytelling for Online Content.”

To construct an effective story, leverage your user research and personas to find or create a character your readers can identify with. Write about that person’s search for a solution and the (real!) risks they face, then take them to a meaningful ending. If the story is personal and told in a first-person voice, so much the better. Founders’ stories work well in this way.

2—Fostering an Evaluative Mindset

Mayo suggests that the “right mindset” in a world of disinformation is neither a trust or distrust mindset, but an evaluative one, which she labels as “Cartesian.” This mindset deliberately inserts a pause before automatically accepting or rejecting a piece of content. It prioritizes “accuracy over the automatic classification of information as true or false.”  It is a form of critical thinking.

As communicators, we can encourage critical thinking by carefully supporting and positioning our main arguments. Here are some suggestions:

• Ask questions that encourage engagement, reflection, and critical assessment. Example: “How could this feature streamline your department’s workflow?”
• Present well-balanced arguments, including realistic side-by-side comparisons.
• Include or reference case studies and similar relatable real-world examples.
• Provide clear, transparent data. List or explain your sources for that data.
• Acknowledge limitations, including situations where a product might not be the best fit.

3—Using Plain Language

Plain language is in essence the language of our readers. Writing in a plain style includes attending to everything from word choice to sentence length. It also includes careful editing for consistency, clarity, accuracy, and adherence to style standards. (See more definitions of plain language in my blog post “A Call for Plain Language in Medicine: My Story.”)

How to apply plain language to your communications entails a much longer discussion. But here are some quick pointers:

• Choose the most common-place words your audience will accept. Leverage a terminology list for consistency.
• Use the simplest sentence structure possible. (For more on sentence structure, review my blog post “The Most Sophisticated Error in Technical Writing.”)
• Write in active voice. The “actor” of the “action” in a sentence should always be clear.
• Eliminate redundancy and verbosity. Cross out adverbs and adjectives unless they add meaning to the sentence.
• Avoid confusing or culture-specific analogies and metaphors.
• Revise for consistent tone and voice throughout. (For definitions and examples of tone and voice, see my blog post “The Secret to Consistent Voice, Tone, and Style.”)

Foundational to all these tips is knowing your audience. Conduct, document, and update user research regularly. Then ensure that your product content addresses what they need, when and how they need it. Remove barriers to understanding so that your brand can thrive.

4—Following a Code of Ethics

As professional communicators, we must, above all, be ethical about the content we create. A couple of decades ago, the now defunct Society for Technical Communication issued a “Code for Communicators.” I still have my copy, printed on nice vellum paper.

I refer to this code all the time. Here are some of my favorite parts:

• Because I recognize that the quality of my services directly affects how well ideas are understood, I am committed to excellence in performance and the highest standards of ethical behavior.
• I…value the time and effort spent by those who read or see or hear my communication.
• I…recognize my responsibility to communicate technical information truthfully, clearly, and economically.
• I will…
  • Hold myself responsible for how well my audience understands my message.
  • Respect the work of colleagues, knowing that seldom is only one communications solution right and all others wrong.

More points could be added. Suggestions are welcome. The idea is for each writer to hold themself accountable for what they put out into the world.

5—Putting Guardrails Around AI

Guidance on using generative AI to release more content into our already content-saturated world should be part of any communicator’s code of ethics moving forward.

For the record, I don’t hold that AI is the enemy of professional writers. It is a tool for your toolbox. It is especially useful when deadlines are closing in and pieces of your content still need refinement. For more ideas on leveraging generative AI in this way, review my blog post “AI Prompting for Bloggers: My Trail-and-Error Discoveries.”

That said, we need to dig deeper into the ethics of using AI to generate content associated with our brand—including our personal brand. Plenty of cautionary tales abound. Note the tale of a fired Disney employee who downloaded a free generative AI tool to his personal computer to help him generate images from text prompts, only to find that it also stole his work-related passwords, which cost him his job. To learn more about AI governance, check out my June 2025 blog post: Agent vs Agency in GenAI Adoption: Framing Ethical Governance.

To start, we can leverage ethical considerations that folks who build AI systems consider. Here are some applicable points I found in Ayodele Odubela’s LinkedIn Learning course “Tech On the Go: Ethics in AI”:

• Prioritize fairness, even when you have to make imperfect trade-offs.
• Mitigate harm whenever possible.
• Check that your data set is complete and inclusive.
• Be transparent about your use of generative AI.

In a world where we are sometimes defined by the worst thing we said or did—or even worse, by something someone else falsely said we did—withdrawing is often not an option. As communicators, we have the awesome (in all senses of that word) responsibility to capture and document truth in the best way we can. Even then, we can expect that some of the receivers of our content will reject it out of hand. That’s okay. We must play a long game. Keep at it. Use your words.

Photo by Elimende Inagella on Unsplash. Some list content created with assistance from ChaptGPT.