Colin Klein is a professor in the School of Philosophy at the ANU. His research focuses on philosophy of psychology, with a special interest in methodological challenges to understanding complex phenomena. He recieved his PhD from Princeton University in 2007, and before ANU he taught at Macquarie University and University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Trust is vital to interpersonal dynamics. Yet most philosophical treatments of trust treat it as a dyadic relationship: that is, they focus on the relationship between two individuals at a time. Online communities provide an interesting venue for studying trust at a much larger scale. I will discuss recent results from two longitudinal studies of Twitter topics, one on antivaccination during the course of the pandemic and the other on different constituencies during the Black Lives Matter protests. Using a variety of convergent methods, we show how pre-existing patterns of trust drive political discourse and attention, and what that might mean for a broader understanding of the psychological factors that drive online social interaction.