A few months ago, I bought a set of false lashes. It was strange because I hadn’t worn lashes in four or five years and hadn’t thought about them at all. But for weeks, false lashes appeared on my feed consistently, even though I wasn’t looking for them.
I saw influencers with round faces like mine wearing them, new mums talking about how they felt like their old selves again, and somewhere between the third and the thirtieth time I saw a video about them, I realised I wanted to look and feel a certain way too, and I bought a pack. It’s been a few months and it’s still sitting untouched in a drawer.
I wish I could say I knew the exact moment it went from something I wasn’t looking for to something I absolutely needed, but I can’t. It was so slow and subtle that I really don’t know when it happened.
I work in communications so I understand how narratives are built and reinforced. When you show someone the same thing over and over, it begins to feel like something they have always known and believed. It’s also quite possible that they don’t notice when or how much their perspective has changed. I know this well, but the algorithm still got me. It made me wonder what happens when that same process is working on things that are not trivial at all, like the opinions we form about complex issues, the assumptions we make about other people, and the confidence with which we will argue about positions and ideas that were drip fed to us until we owned them and stamped our names to them.
This is what I want to talk about in this series, which I’m calling Force Fed. I am interested in the machinery underneath the things we consume, and how social media can shape our personas, our values and the lens through which we view and interact with the world. It has made it possible for us to hold tightly to viewpoints we have simply absorbed rather than examined or thought about.
Let’s call it the illusion of knowledge. A study published in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review found that after scrolling through a social media newsfeed, people felt like they knew more about the topics they had seen, even though their actual knowledge hadn’t changed. The more they scrolled, the more confident they became, but that confidence wasn’t backed by any real increase in understanding.
Think about it. When major news breaks, it floods our feeds. We see so many hot takes that can be quite repetitive. By the tenth post, you may be seeing very little that is truly new and you may not have seen any alternative point of view that challenges the central premise of everything you’ve seen, but you could still feel quite confident that you know all there is to know. The steady stream of short takes, explanations and conclusions causes us to develop a strong sense of familiarity with a subject without ever seeing the evidence, the context, or the competing arguments that would allow us to understand it properly. As a result, our confidence in our position can grow faster than our understanding of it.
Our confidence in our position can grow faster than our understanding of it.
Here’s the practical way this happens. A topic appears on your feed because you watched one video about it. Then another. Then a thread. Then a reaction to the thread. Then someone confidently explaining why the other side is wrong. Before long, you’ve seen the subject dozens of times and it begins to feel as though you’ve really engaged with it, even though most of what you’ve encountered may simply be variations of the same argument.
The same process shapes not just what we think we know but who we listen to. There is almost certainly someone on your feed right now whose opinion carries real weight in your thinking, someone whose qualifications you have never checked and whose track record you could not describe if asked. But they show up consistently and speak with such certainty that you’ve begun to regard them as an authority. You now trust what they say even when you have no real idea what makes them credible.
So why does this happen? Why do people who may have little obvious expertise on a subject become such authoritative figures on social media? Why do we give them so much influence over how we think and approach the world? Part of the answer lies in the way social media rewards content that captures attention and keeps people engaged. If someone speaks confidently and regularly offers conclusions that fit with what you already believe, they are more likely to keep appearing in your feed, and over time that familiarity can start to feel like credibility.
So what’s the best way to engage with social media? I am not going to tell you to go offline. That is not realistic and it misses the point. Social media is where many of us find ideas, people and information now, and there is nothing wrong with learning from it. But there is a difference between letting the feed introduce you to a subject and letting it become the place where your understanding of that subject begins and ends. Depending on what your feed is primed for, you could increasingly lose sight of the complexity of the world despite having its many facets right at your fingertips.
The next time you feel sure about something you picked up through social media, try explaining it in full to someone who disagrees. Don’t do this by simply repeating the take that shaped your view, but by engaging with the strongest version of the argument against your position. Ask yourself what evidence would change your mind and then really examine your position with the new information you’ve received.
I think we can all benefit from embracing curiosity again and accepting that we may not have the answers. Accepting that we may not have been presented with the full picture, and that we may not have had the opportunity to engage with the nuance and complexity that most topics deserve. Perhaps the first step is simply being willing to question whether we really know something, or whether we have just seen enough 5 minute videos that it feels like we do.