Trust Conference 2026: Seven learnings (and a final warning) about the threats to journalism from AI to strongmen

Professional journalism is under pressure from a triple threat: repression from authoritarian leaders, shifting audience behaviour, and the disruption caused by technological change.

These three pressures were present at this year’s Trust Conference, the annual gathering organised by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the Reuters Institute’s core funder. But the discussions also offered a few silver linings, from reporters defying censorship in Guatemala and Uganda, to investigative journalists exposing malignant AI-generated influencers, to exiled editors like our Salvadoran friend Carlos Dada, whose newsroom keeps reporting on its country from afar.

Several delegates pointed to recent elections in Serbia, Brazil and the United States as examples of how civil society and public interest journalism can turn the tide of democratic backsliding and recreate a healthier public sphere. Here are seven learnings (and a final warning) from the first day of the event.

1. News creators are succeeding – especially in countries where traditional journalism is less trusted

Are news creators here to stay? Our own reporting and research suggest news creators account for a significant portion of the way people access news. This is particularly true about news junkies and young people, and even more pronounced in Asia, Latin America and the United States. According to this year’s Digital News Report, a quarter of adults globally now get at least some of their news from creators every week.

At a panel moderated by TRF’s Enrique Anarte, Indian journalist Sruthi Gottipati, founder of the news startup Spot On, stressed that creators are already playing an important role in the information ecosystem and will continue to do so.

“It’s incredibly important that we choose not to be dismissive of this trend,” she said. “We can’t just say, ‘Well, that’s not really news, so I’m not really going to consider the work that they are doing’.”

Gottipati highlighted that some audiences saw news creators’ subjectivity as more honest and engaging. But is there a way to combine the rigour of journalism with the creators’ charisma? That’s what Local News International (LNI) is attempting to do.

Founded by Dave Jorgenson, formerly at the Washington Post, LNI has the delivery and the tone of creators but the foundation of journalism, said its Executive Editor Lauren Saks. They fact-check and do their own sourcing, for example, but with an added comedic edge.

“We think that we are additive,” Saks said. “Hopefully, we are sort of demonstrating new ways that this kind of journalism can be done.”

Our own Nic Newman, lead author of this report on news creators, explained that the use of news creators is higher in global majority countries, where younger audiences distrust traditional news organisations. In Northern Europe, however, stronger trust in traditional media and lower social-media usage mean creators are less prominent.

“[People] have embraced that independence [of news creators] because the media is often seen as being controlled by elites. Providing those different perspectives and a broader range of voices is [partly] why creators are taking off,” Newman said.

One of those creators is South African Amahle-Imvelo Jaxas who sees herself as an explainer of the news rather than a journalist. Looking at the lack of the African perspective in the global news agenda, she considers herself as someone who contextualises the news for her African audience, explaining what it means to them. “You are seeing news creators like myself fill in those gaps of telling the stories that the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily care about,” she said.

2. AI is enabling attacks against journalists and AI-generated influencers are disrupting the public sphere

How is AI disrupting our information ecosystems? Independent media and journalists are facing an unprecedented number of attacks, now facilitated by AI.

Arzu Geybulla, an exiled journalist from Azerbaijan and the co-executive director of the NGO Access Now, said attacks against journalists and civil society groups are getting cheaper, more personal, and outsourced. “It took seven years for [our digital security] helpline to reach 10,000 cases,” said Geybulla. “Up until now, we’ve already received over 3,000 cases in this year alone.”

Natalia Belikova, an exiled journalist from Belarus and the Head of International Cooperation at Press Club Belarus, also outlined how AI-enabled tools have made attacks by malicious actors more potent. She gave the example of an article on how Belarusian authorities and the people close to the government are trying to hide their money in Swiss banks. The article suffered a DDoS attack for 12 hours; the article was attacked half a million times per minute.

“This scale would not have been possible without AI,” said Belikova. “Our tech people said that should this attack last for another hour, we’d be done.”

But even when AI is easily detectable, it can still be used to manipulate. James Clayton, tech editor at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, showcased the example of Danny Bones, a completely AI-generated white-nationalist rapper funded by the far-right political party Advance UK. Bones raps about immigration, national identity and a broken Britain, promoting anti-migrant and anti-Islam messages.

The Bureau exposed the people behind Danny Bones: music producer Denver Bamber and 3-D animator Theo Blackledge, both UK-based. But what stops such AI-generated accounts being used by foreign actors to spread divisive narratives or false facts?

These anonymous AI political influencers can endorse candidates, raise money and even “appear” at rallies without disclosure requirements. Social media platforms have no rules about disclosing who is behind AI political influencers.

“If we’ve learned anything from more than two decades of online discourse, it’s that people can be more brutal, more extreme, and more hostile when they can hide behind an avatar with zero accountability,” said Clayton. “That doesn’t sound great for political transparency and trust in our political system.”

3. Bad actors are shifting from covert deception to overt polarisation

Is the emergence of AI models changing the strategies of those trying to manipulate the public sphere? Ginny Badanes from Microsoft said she and her team are seeing a shift away from spreading blatantly false information to more nuanced strategies.

“Before we saw real efforts to deceive and use disinformation to confuse you about what was real or not real. Now state adversaries are not hiding when using AI,” she said.

Badanes pointed to Iran’s Lego videos as a great example: “No one believes those videos are real; they are cartoonish. They are not hiding that they’re coming from Iran. In fact, they are quite proud of it, and people are watching them, watching them over and over and over again.”

Erika Staël von Holstein from the think tank Re-Imagine Europa argued that divisive narratives take over the public sphere through similar strategies. “We are not fighting about the facts but about what the facts mean,” she said. “Facts mean different things to different people, especially in moments of deep change. The narratives that we’ve been telling ourselves for decades, all of a sudden, don’t really fit with our lived reality.”

In this context, Staël von Holstein argued, polarisation is not so much about content but about our brains’ overconfidence in our own beliefs.

“Climate disinformation is not about climate. Migration disinformation is rarely about migration or race.” she said. “The most effective disinformation campaigns are the ones that use [what I would call] a Trojan horse system. You start arguing about some facts up here, but everyone is very emotional and the real message walks through the door.”

4. These problems can’t be solved by governments alone

How should societies defend themselves against these pernicious narratives? “We need to create information systems where people know what information they can trust, and that’s not just journalism,” said Mel Bunce, Director of the Centre for Journalism and Democracy at the University of London.

Bunce argued for a collective approach: “That’s public officials being better at communicating, councils working with trusted community members such as teachers, doctors, religious leaders at the local level. But there have to be also sources of critical news and information. The government cannot solve this problem alone, and certainly not just working with tech companies.”

Despite the doom and gloom about distrust, audiences still perceive the value of professional journalism, said Bunce, who pointed to one of the top findings of our Digital News Report 2025. When wondering if something is wrong, people don’t go to politicians or academics, she explained; they go to journalists and news sources they trust.

But how can societies rebuild trust in institutions and a shared reality? Former Vice President of the European Commission Věra Jourová argued for a strong, independent, and adequately funded public service media, just as thousands protested in her native Czech Republic over funding cuts at their public broadcaster.

Jourová also said that declining trust is driven by the erosion of truth and information integrity, exacerbated by the rise of digital platforms and AI models. “More and more, we are willing to give the agency to the hands of AI,” she said. “Technological threats are not just technological issues; they are existential issues, and we have to focus on the political power and money involved in solving that.”

5. Democracy and trust are receding across the world

Marina Nord from the V-Dem Institute presented some of the findings of their most recent report, which shows the global trend towards autocracy continuing. By population-weighted measures, democracy has fallen to levels last seen in 1978, and autocracies now outnumber democracies.

Why is this happening? Nord said most of the reasons were context-specific, from corruption to inequality. But at the global level she stressed there’s often a sense that “some fundamental problems are not resolved, and the current government fails to deliver” solutions to those problems.

Nick Hope from Edelman pointed to data from the Edelman Trust Barometer suggesting that seven in ten people don’t trust people with different beliefs, values or information sources. “These tribes of trust lead to the undermining of democracy and a move towards strong men,” he said.

6. A fightback playbook is emerging (and succeeding) in many countries

David Miliband from the International Rescue Committee mentioned some of the findings of the Atlas of Impunity, a piece of research that ranks 190 countries using about 60 indicators across five areas: governance, human rights, conflict, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation.

“Over the last two or three years, we’ve seen the fastest declines in the indicators of press freedom,” Miliband said. “You can guess as to some of the reasons for that: the economics of media today, the conglomeration, also the technological revolution that is transforming the media, taking out gatekeepers and editorial processes.”

Nord from V-Dem offered a couple of glimmers of hope. According to their data, roughly 50% of episodes of autocratisation in the last 125 years were eventually reversed. For the last 30 years, excluding the cases that are now ongoing, the figure is 73%.

Miliband mentioned young people and recent elections in the United States, Serbia, Hungary and South Korea as examples of what he called countervailing power, a concept first developed by economist John Kenneth Galbraith to explain how to staunch the trends towards oligopoly in the economy. “It’s important to build that kind of power and to recognise the way in which democratic governance, rules and norms, and conflict intersect with each other,” he said.

7. Journalists keep reporting (and fighting) despite huge pressure

Salvadoran editor Carlos Dada, who delivered this year’s Reuters Memorial Lecture, spoke movingly about his fight to keep afloat the newspaper he founded in 1998. Despite being in exile, he and his colleagues at El Faro are still exposing injustices. They are also fighting back by suing NSO Group, the Israeli company behind the Pegasus powerful spyware Nayib Bukele’s government used to spy on them.

“We did it to prove that we still have agency,” he said, “that we still have the capacity to respond to these types of actions, which for me is a very important message.”

Dada’s experience mimicked that of British reporter Carole Cadwalladr, who shared her own story of holding power to account. After breaking the scoops of Cambridge Analytica, she was sued by one of Nigel Farage’s funders over a few words she said at a TED talk. Cadwalladr, who expressed her frustration with the Guardian for not supporting her, raised nearly £1 million to fund her own defence.

“It was not just about the lawsuits,” she said. “It was much more of a process in which using the law against me was one strategy in a spectrum of different forms of intimidation that happened over a period of time.”

Agather Atuhaire from the Agora Center for Research said she was abducted and tortured in Tanzania in 2025, and is still dealing with lasting physical effects. She was also arrested in Uganda while protesting the Supreme Court’s delay in ruling on whether civilians could be tried in military courts.

Atuhaire’s own organisation was suspended and its funds frozen under baseless charges in an attack against civil society in the country. According to fellow panellist Angela Mudukuti from E Double A, she is not alone: 54 NGOs were suspended for their activities in Uganda in a single year: 2021.

“They start by branding you as the opposition because you were supposed to be a journalist and be neutral and objective, and apparently becoming an activist or taking the stance that I take against wrong makes me less of a journalist,” she said.

According to polls, up to 70% of Salvadorans are afraid of criticising the regime. This makes Dada’s job even more important now that he’s leading his news site from exile. “This means that we are free to speak about [what the regime does], and this is what we are trying to do,” he said.

“Every single person that wants to get into this craft of journalism needs to have an absolute clarity of mind,” he argued. “The price to pay for doing this has increased a lot. We don’t need people hesitating anymore. We need people who are absolutely committed, knowing that the price is very high.”

“I don’t know what makes me get up to do the work I do because I don’t see any hope in the world,” Atuhaire said. “Maybe it’s because in my mind silence is just not an option. It’s out of the picture whether there’s hope or not.”

8. The final warning: a journalist’s ordeal in Kuwait

At a panel hosted by TRF CEO Antonio Zappulla, journalist and filmmaker Ahmed Shihab-Eldin described the bureaucratic nightmare he faced when he was arrested in Kuwait earlier this year for one of his tweets on the Iran war. He was visiting his sick mother when he was blindfolded, shackled and taken away by plainclothes officers.

Shihab-Eldin spent more than two weeks incommunicado in a black site, and was only moved to the regular prison system after his lawyers intervened. His lawyer explained that he was held for 52 days. Interrogators raised his Palestinian and queer identities, both of which he said he’s equally proud of. Over so many sleepless nights in prison he often thought of American-Palestinian Shireen Abu Akleh, killed by Israel in 2022: “If there was no accountability for her, there would be no accountability for me.”

“What motivates me to share my story with you here today is less my experience and more the people who are much less privileged than me,” Shihab-Eldin said. “Because, ultimately, the fact that I am a US citizen did help get me out of this situation.”

His lawyer Caoilfhionn Gallagher, who mentioned the wrongful imprisonment of Jimmy Lai and Rami Naimi, connected Shihab-Eldin’s case to some of the threats to free speech experienced in Europe and the United States. “We have had about 4,000 arrests over the proscription of Palestine Action in July 2025,” she said. “The average terrorist in this country is now someone in their 60s or 70s with a clean record who is peacefully holding up a placard. That is a disgrace.”