How can we combat political polarization and rebuild trust in democratic institutions in the face of misinformation and disinformation?
I believe much of the answer rests in effective political education. This should not only involve teaching politics in theory, but giving students opportunities to practice how to make decisions as a group with real political stakes.
I have written about this in more detail in case you are interested:
Patrick, J. (2022). Student Leadership and Student Government. Research in Educational Administration & Leadership, 7(1), 1–37.
Patrick, J. (2023, March 17). 💊 What student government can teach us about democracy. The Loop: ECPR’s Political Science Blog. https://theloop.ecpr.eu/what-student-government-can-teach-us-about-democracy/
I would recommend looking at Francis Fukuyama's 1995 book Trust, which does a good job of looking at the question of Trust overall and gives a decent overview. Also very useful is Charles Tilly's (2004) Trust and Rule. Also Robert Putnam's work on Social Capital and Social Trust in his "E pluribus unum: Diversity and community in the twenty‐first century the 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture." Scandinavian political studies 30, no. 2 (2007): 137-174. But the masterclass here is found in Aristotle's Politics Book 5--chapters 1-3.
The problem is not of increasing misinformation and disinformation but rather the breakdown of a shared common life together in a community and the emergence of mass society where there are no or very few intermediating bodies or structures to prevent the sense of powerlessness and isolation individual actors will inevitably experience. Here Tocqueville's account of Individualism in his Democracy In America as well as Hannah Arendt's account of mass society in her Origins of Totalitarianism very much point to the dangers mass social-political bodies whose immense size can but degenerate in the way that echoes Durkheim's anomie. Also, this literature points to the question of whether large-scale societies can be democratic in any meaningful way. Here the Italian School Elite Theory of the late 19th and early 20th (Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, and/or Joseph Schumpeter) suggests large-scale social-political bodies can hardly ever be truly democratic, and getting the people to see this is as much a form of deception (or public myth-making) as anything else. And when the shades and drapes of public myth are torn away whatever factor reestablishing belief in the myth will be difficult.
Also, I would strongly recommend one turns to and read very carefully Al-Farabi's The Political Regime (Al-Siyasa Al-Madaniyya)--this might be a more fruitful way to understand this problem here for the question poser's social and political environment.