To trust or not to trust? How Hong Kong protesters build and maintain trust in a leaderless movement

Protesters in leaderless movements face serious challenges when searching for reliable and trustworthy information in risky environments. Without formal structures to validate information, protestors are left to their own to evaluate the trustworthiness of information in a context where fake social media accounts and deception is possible. We interview protesters from the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement to uncover how they develop trust in fellow protesters and information channels. We find that trust in collective political actions goes beyond the idea of social trust and include the concept of informational trust. Social and informational trust are intertwined with social media as well as with actual practices online and offline. In addition, the so-called ‘sentinel’ structure emerged organically. Information appears to be verified by multiple anonymous and independent sentinels for protestors to believe it. This is a sophisticated attendance to structural information source dependencies. Protestors use a mixture of social, communicative, and dependency cues to decide who and what to trust. They also use social media that has a dual role – simultaneously a community-building information space and a space for misinformation. The paper provides qualitative insight into how protesters deal with social and informational trust in leaderless movements.