Abstract

Trust is the basic element of civil society.For the last decades Ukrainian social institutions, including mass media, suffering of the crisis of trust. Public informing, socialization, formation of public opinion are the main functions of mass media. Mass media takes part in a lot of social processes and spheres of society. Accuracy of the information, compliance with standards,objectivity and trust of the audience are very important because of the influence of the mass media. The paper deals with various interpretations of trust and theories of N.Luhmann, P. Sztompka and A. Seligmen, thatemphasize the importance of trust during the transformation of society. Also author considers the approaches to defining levels of trust. Attention was focused on two levels – the micro-level which represents personal trust and the macro-level with institutional trust. Author analyzes mass media as a social institution and considers social media as a type of mass media, which has its own unique characteristics such as high level of the informational participation, lack of the law regulation and the organizational structure. These characteristics bring to the foreground figure of the author. So the social media covers both levels of forming a trusting relationship with audience – micro and macrolevel.