Abstract
The antidote to perceived risk is trust, and transactions on the Internet are rife with perceived risk. This article establishes a need for trust messages online in a broader context of declining social trust, reviews trust literature, and then provides four tenets of trust that provide a basis for such rhetorically constructed messages. In addition to offering foundations for the rhetorical construction of trust online, the article presents 2 rhetorical paradoxes of trust that contain both opportunity and danger for scholars and netizens alike.
