By: Ashima Shukla, Staff Writer and Zainab Salam, Opinions Editor
There is a genre of content that only grows louder with time: a viral clip where someone argues against abortion, climate change, or immigration issues — with the knowledge of a poorly summarized Wikipedia page and unearned confidence. The audience laughs, groans, or aggressively types a rebuttal, but many click. In a media ecosystem designed to reward attention over thoughtfulness, we risk trading depth for reaction. The result is a culture where complexity becomes inconvenient, misinformation thrives, and our capacity for accountable thinking erodes. We need to resist the logic of virality and build a culture rooted in curiosity, revision, and collective understanding.
As media scholar Wendy Chun argues, authenticity loses all meaning in a system designed to convert attention into profit. The call to be one’s self becomes a directive to become legible to social media algorithms — sortable, marketable, and brandable. Authenticity becomes algorithmic. When pushed towards outrage or confessions, everything becomes entertainment. This media logic doesn’t just distort what we see, it changes how we think, and what we think is worth thinking about.
Feeds become echo chambers recycling ideas — those ideas are not only shaped by our biases but also by algorithms that amplify them. Content is served to mirror an existing worldview or present the most extreme opposition to it, not to foster understanding.
In such a system, entrenchment often replaces revolution. The practice of inquiry is supplanted by repetition: louder answers, rehearsed, and regurgitated. Opinion, trauma, and rage are performed; not to deepen understanding but to remain visible. To participate. And when that is the metric, complexity becomes inconvenient. Empathy becomes inefficient. Accountability becomes irrelevant.
The path forward isn’t certainty — it’s the willingness to reject the myth of objectivity in favour of shared, collective truth-seeking.
The invincible ignorance fallacy (and several studies) tell us that the least informed are often the most confident in their opinions — precisely because they don’t know how much they don’t know. Even well-intentioned people falter. Fearing the backlash of cancel culture or accusations of bias, media outlets default to a false sense of balance. Every issue is treated as a two-sided debate, even when one side is factually incoherent or ethically indefensible. Case in point? The New York Times’ coverage of trans health continues to platform inaccurate information.
So how do we begin to challenge this system and move toward better thinking? We shouldn’t be neutral. We need to be honest. To resist the manipulations of a media environment that thrives on our worst impulses: our desire to be right, our fear of exclusion, and our discomfort with complexity. The challenge is to build a culture that can hold truth, even when it implicates us.
This is where we can learn from science. As history of science scholar Naomi Oreskes reminds us, the strength of science is not found in the infallibility of individuals or in the myth of objectivity. It lies in its social fabric — in peer review, in replication, in the collective effort to get it more correct over time. It succeeds when it accounts for bias and makes objectivity a shared process, not an individual characteristic. The way we did in rebuilding the ozone layer, despite opposition.
The goal is to create a culture where curiosity, revision, and errors are celebrated. To acknowledge that our thinking is inevitably shaped by our biases, values, backgrounds and to create systems of accountability where we can learn to move beyond hot takes towards nuanced discussions. In a culture overrun by algorithmic outrage, curiosity is radical. The path forward isn’t certainty — it’s the willingness to reject the myth of objectivity in favour of shared, collective truth-seeking.
