Building Trust in the Age of Anti-Trust: The New Reputation Risk Battleground
- Laurel Ostfield
- Jan 20
- 5 min read
By: Laurel Ostfield, Emmanuel Caisse and Sumi Shanmuganathan
Recently, our founders at PredictEdge and 996 Advisors came together for a standing-room-only session at the Next Campaign Summit titled Building Trust in the Age of Anti-Trust. It wasn’t designed as a lecture, but as a pressure test because trust is no longer the backdrop to our work. It’s the bottom line.
Amidst the first snowstorm of the year, campaign operatives, government relations professionals, advocates, and public-sector leaders still made their way to the event. The full room was a quiet signal of how urgent this conversation has become.
From Institutions to Individuals: Where Trust Actually Lives Now
One of the clearest patterns surfaced early: trust has shifted away from institutions and toward individuals. Data from a recent report by Media Ecosystem Observatory shared during the session showed that 42% of Canadians engage with influencers on political topics, rising to 64% among younger Canadians and nearly half of partisans. People are no longer asking, “Is this official?” They’re asking, “What do people like me think about ?”
Echo Chambers: When Likes Lie and Leaders Lose the Plot
Most of us won’t admit it out loud, but we all do the same thing online: we avoid clicking on content we disagree with because we don’t want to “pollute” our feeds. We think we’re training the algorithm to suit our preferences — but in reality, the algorithm is training us right back. Every avoided click narrows our field of vision a little more. Over time, that creates a dangerous dynamic: by the time real‑world feedback finally breaks through, it’s often too late to course‑correct. Echo chambers don’t just mislead audiences; they mislead leaders and decision‑makers.
We’ve seen the consequences. As Rob Flaherty, Kamala Harris’ Campaign Digital Chief, put it:
“We were in these echo chambers where we thought we were winning the cultural argument, but influencers and real‑world conversations showed us we weren't connecting on what mattered.”
Internal dashboards can look healthy while external trust collapses — think of the Bud Light backlash, or political campaigns that dominated Twitter/X yet failed to move undecided voters. Inside the bubble, likes feel like persuasion, applause feels like momentum, and silence from outside the base becomes invisible. When there’s no data from beyond your own audience, you can’t detect drift until it’s already become a problem.
This dynamic becomes even sharper inside a double echo chamber — for example as many leaders underestimate YouTube’s importance to everyday Canadians, and where YouTube itself is split into distinct left‑ and right‑leaning ecosystems.
To demonstrate, we analyzed three groups: the top 10 left‑leaning indie channels, the top 10 right‑leaning indie channels, and the top 10 incumbent media organizations. In 2025, the left and right indies had roughly the same follower counts, each sitting at about one‑tenth the size of the incumbents. Yet the performance gap was striking: right‑leaning creators generated more than twice the views and 2.2× the engagement. Meanwhile, incumbents underperformed significantly, despite having 10× the followers and 5× the views - a clear indicator that audiences are not as connected with them. In a landscape where audiences “like first and trust later,” this shift tells us something important about how influence is actually built.
However, it’s also important to note that, in Canada, the gap narrowed dramatically over 2025. What started as a 100–400% advantage for right‑leaning influencers shrank to just 20–50% by Q4.
Influencers Aren’t Billboards and Authenticity Isn’t a Tone if you Want to Reduce Reputation Risk
At 996 Advisors, we think about this through the lens of Circles of Influence — the layered networks of creators who shape the people who ultimately shape public opinion. Influencers aren’t billboards; they’re translators. Fit matters more than reach. The real question isn’t “Who has the biggest audience?” but “Who carries legitimacy with the people we need to move?” When influencer strategy is treated like media buying, it fails. Alignment beats amplification every time.
Community credibility outweighs follower count. Misaligned messengers trigger skepticism instantly. And one poorly chosen partnership can alienate the very people you need to keep. The biggest mistake brands and campaigns make is treating influencers as mouthpieces. When you step outside your own echo chamber, you’re stepping into spaces with different norms, different expectations around debate, conflict, authority, institutions, and transparency. If you don’t understand those norms, you won’t earn trust
As professionals working across marketing, communications, politics, and advocacy, authenticity comes up on a regular basis, not as a branding exercise or a “be more relatable” tactic, but as coherence. Authenticity today is alignment between values, actions, and responses, especially when something goes wrong. Audiences have become increasingly sophisticated at detecting performance.
They pay close attention to how organizations behave under stress. Silence reads as avoidance. Over-polished messaging reads as manipulation. Listening before messaging has become one of the clearest signals of credibility.
Authenticity isn’t revealed at launch. It’s revealed in moments of friction.
Ethical Intelligence: Data Done Right
In the Canadian context, where unease about surveillance, profiling, and opaque technology runs deep, transparency is no longer optional. Ethical intelligence isn’t about using less data, it’s about using data people understand and would reasonably agree to share. If a system can’t be explained, paused, or overridden by a human, it isn’t innovative, it’s a liability. Compliance may keep you legal, but it won’t keep you trusted. Black-box targeting, repurposing data beyond original intent, or optimizing outrage over understanding may deliver short-term performance, but they quietly erode legitimacy.
Used well, data doesn’t replace judgment; it protects it. Knowing your audience isn’t enough. You need to know who they listen to, where influence actually flows, and how trust is transferred between people, platforms, and communities.
A key tension surfaced during our discussion: trust doesn’t equal truth. People can trust something that isn’t accurate and reject something that is. Ethical intelligence means holding both and building trust without abandoning facts. Or, more simply, virality gets you noticed. Trust gets you believed. But truth is still your responsibility.
The Red Line Most Organizations Haven’t Named
Every organization also has a red line but most don’t realize it until it is sometimes too late. When pressure mounts, whether from polling, fundraising gaps, public outrage, or tight timelines, unnamed values collapse. Who has veto power? What signals harm rather than success? What triggers escalation? If those questions aren’t answered in advance, legality becomes the default boundary and legality is rarely where trust is actually lost.
It’s also important to be clear about what this conversation was and wasn’t. The discussion was intentionally high-level. Campaign outcomes are shaped by many factors beyond trust alone: funding, media spend, organizational capacity, timing, and access to distribution all influence which messages travel and which channels appear to “win.” Some voices are amplified not because they are more trusted, but because they are better resourced. That reality doesn’t weaken the insights; it contextualizes them.
What we explored at Next Campaign was how trust behaves under pressure, using current data on where audiences actually reside and the channels they actively use. At a high level, we examined how echo chambers mislead even experienced teams, and how credibility erodes when authenticity, transparency, and ethical guardrails aren’t built into campaign strategy, especially in an era defined by anti-trust.
This is where 996 Advisors and PredictEdge help organizations navigate complexity by mapping real influence beyond surface metrics, pressure-testing strategy outside internal bubbles, and designing campaigns that balance reach with resilience, not to eliminate risk, but to manage it deliberately.
Trust isn’t built at launch. It’s built upstream, in the quiet decisions made when no one is watching yet. The next cycle won’t reward the loudest or the fastest. It will reward the organizations that earn trust slowly and lose it reluctantly.
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