The Exploitation of Trust in Digital Media: Everyday Cybersecurity Risks and Forms of Individual Harm

Creative Commons License

Çelebi E.

Digital Security and Media, cilt.3, sa.2, ss.7-31, 2026 (Hakemli Dergi)

Özet

Because digital everyday life has become intertwined with banking, public services, shopping, education, and social networking practices, the concept of cybersecurity needs to be examined not only as technical system security, but also in terms of individual harms and trust relations. Within the existing awareness research, which mostly focuses on passwords, link checking, malware, and device security, the relationship between the framing of harm in public communication and the exploitation of trust has not been examined sufficiently. In this study, in which a qualitative document analysis design and directed qualitative content analysis were used together to examine 105 meaning units obtained from 10 webpages published by Siberay and ICTA/GüvenliWeb and prepared for citizens, the findings, which showed that loss of data and identity control was the most prominent primary harm, also revealed that this was followed by psychological, economic, and privacy-related harms. The examined texts construct the process of exploitation of trust, which operates through technical/platform trust, uncertainty and lack of knowledge, human vulnerability, privacy expectations, interpersonal imitation, and institutional impersonation, by borrowing credibility cues, accelerating decisions through fear, urgency, or promised benefit, and assigning the responsibility for protection largely to user vigilance. In this study, in which an interpretive Trust Exploitation–Harm Pathway linking trust cues, performances of trustworthiness, activated vulnerabilities, induced actions, interconnected harms, and responsibility frames is proposed, it is argued that cybersecurity awareness should also include the capacity to recognize how trust is produced, imitated, and weaponized.