THE MANUFACTURE OF COUNTERFEIT TRUST

Liviu Poenaru

April 2026

No, we are not facing only an erosion of epistemic trust, but an epistemic shift. The problem is not simply that people trust less; it is that they increasingly trust differently. The collapse of confidence in institutions, science, journalism, images, and expert systems does not produce a population of lucid skeptics calmly examining evidence. More often, it produces subjects who are epistemically disoriented and therefore newly available to substitute beliefs, substitute authorities, and substitute knowledge systems. When the old structures of verification weaken, something else enters the empty space: conspiratorial explanations, algorithmic certainties, influencer-based authority, pseudo-scientific systems, tribal narratives, machine-generated answers, and emotionally charged forms of revelation. Belief does not disappear; it mutates. This mutation is reinforced by a wider information environment in which misinformation and disinformation are now identified as major short-term global risks, capable of widening political and social divisions (World Economic Forum 2024).

A fake civilization does not emerge only when truth is destroyed. It emerges when counterfeit knowledge becomes socially functional. False or unstable knowledge can guide behavior, create belonging, organize indignation, offer identity, explain suffering, designate enemies, and produce the intoxicating feeling that one has finally understood what others refuse to see. In this sense, fake knowledge is not weak. It may even be stronger than verified knowledge because it is faster, simpler, more emotionally saturated, and better adapted to platform circulation. Verified knowledge requires time, method, contradiction, uncertainty, peer review, and the discipline of doubt. Counterfeit knowledge offers something far more seductive: the pleasure of knowing without the ordeal of verification. This is also why deepfakes are not only dangerous because they deceive; they are dangerous because they increase uncertainty itself, which may reduce trust in news and intensify generalized epistemic cynicism (Vaccari and Chadwick 2020).

This logic extends across several domains, even if each has its own mechanisms. In science, paper mills and fake authorship markets produce papers without research and authors without authorship. The BuyTheBy dataset, for example, documents 18,710 advertisements from seven paper-mill businesses, including 15,839 advertisements with prices listed, 20,598 authorship positions offered for sale, and 5,567 unique products across fourteen product categories (Richardson, Hong, and Abalkina 2026). Nature’s report on this dataset shows how the market for academic fraud has become organized enough to sell research-paper authorship as a reputational commodity (Naddaf 2026). In visual culture, synthetic images and deepfakes produce images without stable referents. In journalism, accelerated circulation produces news without sufficient verification. In digital expertise, influencers and automated systems produce authority without formation, confidence without accountability, and explanation without epistemic responsibility. These are not separate accidents. They belong to the same civilizational mutation: the forms of knowledge remain, but the disciplines that once made knowledge trustworthy are progressively bypassed, simulated, or emptied from within.

The disturbing point is therefore not that everything has become fake. That would be too simple, and also false. The real and the fake now coexist inside the same infrastructures: the same journals, feeds, databases, platforms, images, narratives, and cognitive habits. The fake no longer stands outside civilization as its parasite; it is increasingly integrated into the mechanisms of success, visibility, recognition, and authority. This is the deeper shift: epistemic trust is eroded from one side, while new counterfeit regimes of trust are manufactured from the other. The subject is not left ignorant. Worse, the subject is increasingly trained to trust what has been optimized to deceive, flatter, mobilize, confirm, or sell.

References

Naddaf, Miryam. 2026. “How Much for a Fake Authorship? Ad Database Reveals Secrets of Scientific Fraud.” Nature, April 24, 2026. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01340-y?utm

Richardson, Reese, Spencer Hong, and Anna Abalkina. 2026. BuyTheBy: An Annotated Dataset of Paper Mill Advertisements with Price Data. Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/records/19684278

Vaccari, Cristian, and Andrew Chadwick. 2020. “Deepfakes and Disinformation: Exploring the Impact of Synthetic Political Video on Deception, Uncertainty, and Trust in News.” Social Media + Society 6 (1): 1–13. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305120903408

World Economic Forum. 2024. The Global Risks Report 2024. 19th ed. Geneva: World Economic Forum. https://www.weforum.org/press/2024/01/global-risks-report-2024-press-release/