Whether you trust the word of the journalist has little relation to the story. The "socially acceptable lower threshold of trust" is not static for all stories; it changes depending on the stakes of the story.

Non-consequential: A photo of a cat with a funny caption. I am likely to trust the caption by default, because the energy of doubting it is not worth the stakes. If the caption is a lie, it does nothing to change my worldview or any actions I will ever take. Nobody's life will be worse off for not having spent an hour debunking an amusing story fabricated over a cat photo.

Trivially consequential: Somebody relates a story about an anonymous, random person peddling misinformation based on photos with false captions on the internet. Whether I believe that specific random person did has no bearing on anything. The factor from the story that might influence your worldview is the knowledge that there are people in the world who are so easily swayed by false captions on photos, and that itself is a trivially verifiable fact, including other people consuming the exact photo and misinformation from the story.

More consequential: Somebody makes an accusation against a world leader. This has the potential to sway opinions of many people, feeding into political decisions and international relations. The stakes are higher. It is therefore prudent not to trust without evidence of the specific accusation at hand. Providence of evidence does also matter; not everything can be concretely proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. We should not trust people blindly, but people who have a history of telling the truth are more credible than people who have a history of lying, which can influence what evidence is sufficient to reach a socially acceptable threshold of trust.

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groestl 8 hours ago | parent [-]

The point about the stakes is a good one. But there is an individiual factor to it. And maybe it's exactly because of the stakes you mention: if you perceive your personal stakes to be low, or might even gain something out of redistributing the message, no matter if fabricated or not, your threshold might be low as well.

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oarsinsync 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> > Trivially consequential: Somebody relates a story about an anonymous, random person peddling misinformation based on photos with false captions on the internet. Whether I believe that specific random person did has no bearing on anything.

> The point about the stakes is a good one. But there is an individiual factor to it.

Indeed. The so called "trivially consequential" depends on whether you're the person being "mis-informationed" about or not. You could be a black man with a white grandchild, and someone could then take a video your wife posted of you playing with your grandchild, and redistribute it calling you a pedophile, causing impact to your life and employment. Those consequences don't seem trivial to the people impacted.

True story: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/aug/20/family-in-fear...

	▲	anonymous908213 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is a complete and total misrepresentation of what I said. The key point here is that the "accused" in the trivial story is anonymous. They are fungible. Their identity is irrelevant to the story; it is merely an anecdote about the fact that a person like this exists, and people who exhibit the exact same behaviour as them verifiably do exist, so there is nothing to be misinformed about. A tangible accusation against a specific individual is completely different, and obviously is consequential.