In the words of Yevgeny Simkin:

"Let’s take a short walk down memory lane. It’s 1995. A man stands on a busy street corner yelling vaguely incoherent things at the passersby. He’s holding a placard that says ‘THE END IS NIGH. REPENT.’ You come upon this guy while out getting the paper. How do you feel about him? You might feel some flavor of annoyance. Most people would also feel compassion for him as he is clearly suffering from something. No reasonable person would think of convincing this man that his point of view is incorrect. This isn’t an opportunity for an engaging debate. . . Now fast forward to 2020. In terms of who this guy is and who you are absolutely nothing has changed. And yet here you are—arguing with him on Twitter or Facebook. And you, yourself, are being brought to the brink of insanity. . . Back in 2011 Chamath Palihapitiya left Facebook and said of his former company, ‘It literally is a point now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works’. . . I’m here to make the case that all modern social, political, and sociological ills can be traced to social media. It is single-handedly responsible for the tearing apart of our social fabric which Palihapitiya so presciently predicted. It’s not ‘part of’ the problem. It is the problem: An insidious malware slowly corrupting our society in ways that are extremely difficult to quantify, but the effects of which are evident all around us. Anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, QAnon, cancel-culture, Alex Jones, flat-Earthers, racists, anti-racists, anti-anti-racists. . . "

Lee McIntyre:

"With fact and opinion now presented side by side on the Internet, who knows what to believe anymore? With no filters and no vetting, readers and viewers these days are readily exposed to a steady stream of pure partisanship."

Tom Nichols argues:

"These are dangerous times. Never have so many people had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so resistant to learn anything. In the United States and other developed nations, otherwise intelligent people denigrate intellectual achievement and reject the advice of experts. Not only do increasing numbers of laypeople lack basic knowledge, they reject fundamental rules of evidence and refuse to learn how to make a logical argument. In doing so, they risk throwing away centuries of accumulated knowledge and undermining the practices and habits that allow us to develop new knowledge. This is more than a natural skepticism toward experts. I fear we are witnessing the death of the ideal of expertise itself, a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laypeople, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers—in other words, between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all."

Lawrence Eppard and his colleagues explain:

"A variety of factors—including cultural notions of equality ('all opinions are equal'), the complexity of modern life, innumeracy, scientific illiteracy, civic disengagement and political illiteracy, a decline in trust in people and institutions, a culture of narcissism/individualism/anti-intellectualism, extreme partisanship, ideological silos and echo chambers, the internet, the decline of traditional news, the proliferation of low-quality news sources like cable news and partisan internet websites (despite the continued existence of high-quality sources like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal), the rise of talk radio and punditry, the democratization and commodification of higher education, and social media—have helped to undermine notions of truth, facts, a shared reality, and the value of expertise, sending mass ignorance into hyper-drive."

In the words of Lee McIntyre:

"The cognitive bias has always been there. The internet was the accelerant which democratized all of the disinformation and misinformation and diminished the experts. Democratization has led to the abandonment of standards for testing beliefs. It leads people to think they are just as good at reasoning about something as anybody else. But they’re not. At the doctor’s office, I don’t ask for the data and reason through it myself and decide on the course of treatment. It takes expertise and experience to make that judgement. Just like I can’t fly my own plane. There is a scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where he is in the room with all of these goblets and chalices and doesn’t know which one is the Holy Grail. That’s where we are right now. We have the truth right in front of us, but we don’t know which one it is. There is a slogan that science deniers use, ‘Do your own research.’ If science is about facts, why can’t I just go out and find my facts? But you need guidance to know what is factual, you need experts. Many Americans have an enormous misunderstanding about science generally. They misunderstand the term ‘theory,’ for instance, thinking that any theory is as good as any other, rather than realizing that some theories are more credible than others because they are warranted by the evidence."

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