The Calibrated Deepfake Trust Score (CDTS): Competence-Coupled Trust Degradation Across Deepfake Detectors

In moderation, provenance, and verification pipelines a deepfake detector's output probability is read as a degree of trust, so its calibration matters as much as raw accuracy. We reframe deepfake detection as a calibrated, self-auditing trust instrument, the Calibrated Deepfake Trust Score (CDTS), and identify what governs its trustworthiness. Our central finding is a competence-trust coupling with a sharp division: the raw score's miscalibration tracks discriminative competence almost perfectly (r = -0.98, -0.98, -0.95 across two convolutional networks and a CLIP vision transformer), and a calibrator deployed without target labels fails with competence just as tightly (r = -0.98 on the primary detector, for isotonic, Platt, and beta calibrators alike). Given target labels, by contrast, any well-specified calibrator repairs any detector, including inverted ones: in-domain calibratability is not competence-limited, and the trust failure is a distribution-shift phenomenon concentrated exactly on the low-competence generators that motivate deployment. Explanation faithfulness rises and falls on the same competence axis. We reach this conclusion after uncovering, and correcting, a tie-handling degeneracy in the standard equal-mass expected-calibration-error (ECE) estimator that fabricates strong spurious competence-calibration coupling on tie-heavy calibrated scores; the same degeneracy invalidates calibration-equity gaps we previously reported, a caution for fairness auditing. Competence is trackable without labels: batch predictive entropy flags generators with high deployed calibration error at ROC-AUC 0.99, and routing source-batches on label-free competence beats confidence-based routing precisely in the low-competence regimes the coupling identifies, while confidence regains the advantage where competence is high. Trust scoring must be competence-aware; CDTS is the mechanism.