Can you really believe your eyes anymore?
Nick Bondura is a senior brand strategist at Neuemotion, focused on social media and brand communication.
Scroll through your feed, and you’ll probably catch yourself pausing on something, narrowing your eyes slightly, and wondering whether what’s in front of you is real. Five years ago that way of thinking would have felt paranoid, but now it’s closer to basic media literacy.
I’ve started calling this “screen suspicion”: the habit of doubting the truthfulness, the intention, or the verifiability of anything that shows up on a screen. First we learned to count fingers in AI-generated images, then we started studying whether a mouth matched the words coming out of it. Lately the checks have gotten stranger, closer to debating the physics of a video showing the Hollywood sign on fire, because as the tech has become more convincing, we have become more cynical.
Generative AI deserves a share of the blame for this shift, but treating it as purely an AI problem doesn’t get to the root of the issue. Audiences have been sharpening this instinct for years in response to platforms that reward extreme behavior and to users who learned to play along with it. Ragebait, astroturfed reviews, and manufactured controversy cosplaying as spontaneous outrage all trained people to look for the trap.
What’s driving it
A few forces are compounding at once, and acting like a performance storm of decaying brand trust, AI innovation, and the attention economy.
The clearest is plain negativity bias. Trust with an audience builds slowly and breaks fast, and a brand can earn goodwill through a hundred honest posts only to lose most of it the moment a follower feels misled. The deeper a follower’s investment in the brand, the harder the fall tends to be when the brand lets them down.
Closely related is something I’d call performativity fatigue. Once posting became a career and an income stream for creators and brands alike, every post felt like performative authenticity and vulnerability for the sake of engagement. Even genuine moments now get read as calculated, because audiences have seen enough manufactured ones to assume the worst by default.
Harder to solve for is plain exhaustion. A decade of doomscrolling has left a lot of users, particularly younger ones, disengaging rather than doing the work of sorting real from fake, and that disengagement shows up as declining time-on-platform because consumers are simply too tired.
Put those together and the audience most brands are trying to reach today is warier, slower to convince, and quicker to leave than the one their existing playbook was built for.
Proof doesn’t feel like proof anymore
For years, brands leaned on four shortcuts to earn trust on social: metrics, testimonials, visuals, and voice. Each one is losing power, and for related reasons.
Metrics used to tell a brand what was working. Now paid amplification, algorithmic boosts, and bots in general make it hard to know whether a number reflects genuine interest or a media buy dressed up as one. Testimonials used to signal that someone credible vouched for you, but review bombing, review farming, and AI-generated influencers have flooded that channel with noise, and audiences have grown wary of anything that reads like an endorsement as a result. Visuals used to draw a clean line around what belonged to a brand and what didn’t, and generative tools paired with slow-moving IP law have blurred that line for nearly everyone. Voice, the thing brands spent a decade trying to make sound more human, now carries the risk of sounding like every other brand that fed the same prompts into the same tools.
The research backs up what most of us already feel. Deloitte found that seventy percent of people say AI-generated content makes it harder to trust what they see online, and more than two-thirds worry it could be used to deceive them outright. Accenture found that the share of consumers who name trust as a deciding factor in brand engagement now sits at 62% percent, up from 56% two years earlier. For most brands, that shift moves trust from something worth mentioning in a values statement to a baseline condition for getting an audience’s attention at all.
What works now
The bar for proof has moved, and the brands clearing it tend to be the ones with real things to point to rather than polished ones: real people, real process behind the work.
One practice worth building into a content plan now is simply showing that process. If something took real effort, real people or an actual production to make, saying so has become one of the faster ways to get ahead of the skepticism that a polished, unexplained video would otherwise invite. That doesn’t mean turning every post into a behind-the-scenes reel, but it does mean treating the how as content worth planning for rather than an afterthought.
Who delivers the message matters more than it used to as well. Part of the friction audiences feel with celebrity and influencer endorsements is that the endorser can come across as stepping down to the brand’s level rather than the brand rising to meet theirs, and in the worst cases, an endorsement from someone the internet has already decided is a sellout drags the brand down with them. Employees and actual customers, even when they’re visibly less polished on camera, tend to land better than a professional spokesperson precisely because the rough edges read as unrehearsed. We know celebrities and influencers are getting paid, but we tend to believe the person who is behind the scenes really doing the work.
Where content gets made is worth reconsidering too. As trust in what happens on a screen erodes, brands are seeing more value in getting out from behind graphics and into the field, capturing real experiences and real environments instead of leaning on production that could plausibly have been generated. This matters more the further a brand’s presence has drifted toward looking studio-made.
And it’s worth watching for sameness, since it tends to signal a brand has drifted onto the same playbook as everyone else. If a brand’s current content strategy sounds like its closest competitors, or worse, sounds like the output of the same handful of AI tools everyone’s using, that’s usually the moment to break from the pattern rather than refine it further. Nothing is worse than sounding like every other post in the feed.
Where this leaves brands
A more skeptical audience is an opportunity, not necessarily a threat. Discerning audiences tend to reward the brands that give them something concrete to believe in. The bar is higher now than it was even two years ago, and that means fewer brands will manage to clear it… which is precisely what makes doing so worth the effort.
Being deemed as real becomes the moat.
For those of us working in comms and brand strategy, the practical takeaway isn’t to wait until the next platform controversy forces the issue. Audiences are already reading brand content with more suspicion than most strategies were built to survive, and the ones that adjust now, before the next generation of AI tools makes the gap even harder to close, are the ones likeliest to still be trusted when it does.
What are you doing to be believed?
The post What happens when your audience is suspicious of everything appeared first on PR Daily.
