DIS-TRUST Team Attends Amsterdam Trust Summit
The DIS-TRUST team kicked off the new academic year with three presentations at the 2025 Amsterdam Trust Summit. The conference, held in Amsterdam on 28th and 29th of August, was organised by the Trust in the Digital Society research priority area at Amsterdam University, where DIS-TRUST postdoc Micol Mieli is also staying as a guest researcher during the months of August and September.
The interdisciplinary conference invited contributions from researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and activists across diverse fields, from law, communication, computer science, political science, sociology, media studies, philosophy and more, to explore the evolving dynamics of trust in our digital society. Themes include trust and distrust in emerging technologies, the relationships between people and institutions in a rapidly digitising world, and how infrastructures, narrative, methods and regulation shape trust or undermine it.
DIS-TRUST project PI Esther Oluffa Pedersen presented her ongoing work on the panoramic view of trust in the digital society, a theoretical framework for understanding different trust relationships in the digital society, from the interpersonal, to the institutional, including self-trust and trust in technology. In the presentation, she illustrated the framework through case studies on Denmark’s digital property assessment case and the UK royal family’s digitally manipulated photo controversy.
Micol Mieli, Postdoc, presented the results of her study on Airbnb’s software patents, which she combined with the analysis of legal terms of the platform to explore embedded values and assumptions about trust and trustworthiness in the algorithms used to screen and filter people on the accommodation platform.
Mads Vestergaard, Postdoc in the DIS-TRUST project, discussed his empirical research on the Danish property assessment case. The analysis focuses on how too much trust in technology can lead to the erosion of trust, and explores what lessons past digitalisation failures can offer for the future implementation of technologies like artificial intelligence and automated decision making systems in public institutions.
The event offered a valuable opportunity to present the project’s first findings and ongoing work to an interdisciplinary community of scholars engaged with questions of trust in the digital society. The Trust in the Digital Society research priority area at the University of Amsterdam is conducting work that resonates strongly with the DIS-TRUST team and this network opportunity was especially valuable to create synergy between the projects.