Relational Trust and the Legitimacy of Digital Content Regulation

Abstract

Digital content regulation has become a central policy challenge in platform-mediated information environments, where efforts to mitigate misinformation and online harm often collide with concerns about freedom of expression. Existing scholarship commonly explains public support for regulation through individual-level attributes such as ideology, digital literacy, and media use. This study advances a relational trust framework, arguing that regulatory legitimacy is socially constructed through trust embedded in interpersonal, institutional, and platform-based relationships. Drawing on a quota-based survey of 270 respondents in urban and rural Mongolia, the study uses Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) and multigroup analysis to examine direct, mediating, and moderating effects across four trust dimensions: strong-tie trust, weak-tie trust, institutional trust, and platform trust. The findings show that institutional trust is the strongest predictor of acceptance of digital content regulation, while strong-tie, weak-tie, and platform trust also exert significant positive effects. Relational trust fully mediates the relationship between freedom of expression concerns and regulatory acceptance, indicating that trust is a central mechanism through which democratic values are interpreted and negotiated. Urban–rural and generational differences further reveal that trust operates in context-specific ways. By foregrounding relational trust, the study explains regulatory legitimacy as a socially embedded outcome, especially in small states operating under asymmetric platform power.