The gates before the evidence
Imagine you can't trust your government, your news, or your internet connection. Every app you use to reach the outside world is officially blocked. The VPN you rely on drops without warning.
When a crisis hits — and one did, in June 2025 — you're flooded with rumors and have no fast way to tell which ones could get you or your family hurt. The people trying to help you sort fact from fiction look, at first glance, a lot like the people trying to manipulate you.
That's daily life for young Iranians online. And it turns out, how they decide what to trust has implications far beyond Iran.
Over nearly a year of field research with Iranian Gen Z (surveys, interviews, and a crisis case study conducted during the June 2025 Iran-Israel conflict) we found that the first decision is not "Is this true?" It's "Do I stay with this content?" and "Is this person safe and relevant enough to listen to?"
Those judgments happen fast, under constraint: VPN friction, unstable connectivity, uncertainty about who's acting in good faith, and a platform where journalism doesn't compete with other journalism — it competes with creator formats built for pace and personality.
This research was conducted by Gazzetta and ASL19 as part of a project to strengthen how Factnameh, ASL19's Persian-language information manipulation research initiative, reaches young audiences inside Iran.
The study focused on a filtered environment where YouTube is officially blocked and access requires circumvention tools. But the core finding — that credibility forms through a sequence of gates, and most interventions fail by addressing the later gates (method, sources, verdict) without clearing the earlier ones (attention, relational safety, identity fit) — applies to anyone publishing on YouTube or trying to understand how information builds trust on social platforms.
We call this the Journey to Trust framework. It models what we observed across thousands of respondents, in a form media organizations can use.
The framework translates into a publishing sequence you can repeat, review, and improve. Evidence doesn't compete in the arena of the scroll. If attention is lost and intent is misread, proof never reaches the viewer. The format's job is to clear those early gates (attention and relational safety) without diluting rigor, then make proof visible fast enough that belief transfers from the messenger to the method.
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If you sign up, over the next few weeks you'll also get a playbook for YouTube creators on how to operationalize these findings.
Feedback or questions: hello@gazzetta.xyz.
