There was a time when becoming “the person who knew about something” was a rather hard and lengthy process because you had to spend years learning it. Doctors went to medical school, teachers trained to teach, engineers learnt enough mathematics to make the rest of us break out in a cold sweat, and scientists devoted decades to researching subjects so obscure that only three other people in the world understood what they were talking about (but many of us still loved the Big Bang Theory!). Even journalists, despite what many people like to think, generally had to find more than one source before typing an article. Expertise wasn’t perfect, mistakes were made and poor advice certainly existed, but there was at least an expectation that if someone stood up and claimed to know what they were talking about, there would be something substantial behind the claim.
Today, all that appears terribly old-fashioned because we have somehow wandered into an age where a smartphone, a ring light and enough confidence to stare directly into a camera have become the modern equivalent of a doctorate. Somewhere along the way we collectively decided that looking knowledgeable is practically the same thing as being knowledgeable, and social media has happily encouraged that delusion because confidence generates engagement far more effectively than competence ever could. The internet has become the only place on Earth where somebody can wake up on Monday knowing absolutely nothing about the endocrine system and by Wednesday be selling a course explaining why hormones are responsible for every problem you’ve experienced since Year 8.
I am not dissing the internet because it is one of the greatest educational tools humanity has ever created. Never before has it been possible to watch lectures from some of the world’s finest universities, read scientific papers published only hours earlier, listen to experts discussing their life’s work, or learn practical skills from people who genuinely know their craft. If you want to understand astrophysics, learn French cooking, repair a Victorian sash window or discover why octopuses continue to make evolutionary biologists scratch their heads, the information is sitting there waiting for you.
The problem isn’t that expertise has become more accessible, it’s the internet has enabled people to pretend to have expertise… This distinction matters because social media doesn’t verify knowledge before handing somebody an audience. It rewards attention and if attention happens to come from careful research and years of experience, wonderful. If it comes from pouting at the camera while waving a colourful diagram around and claiming doctors have been lying for decades, that’s apparently equally acceptable. The algorithm isn’t interested in whether you’re right. It simply notices that thousands of people stopped scrolling, became outraged, frightened or fascinated, and promptly decides that millions more should probably see it as well.
Somewhere inside Silicon Valley there is almost certainly an engineer who never imagined that a recommendation algorithm would one day become the world’s largest distributor of complete and utter twaddle …
Spend half an hour scrolling through almost any social media platform and you’ll encounter a parade of self-appointed authorities that would have been rejected from talking about jam making at a village fête twenty years ago. There are “medical experts” confidently explaining that every illness known to mankind is caused by inflammation, parasites or toxins. Apparently every ache, pain, headache, rash, bad mood or missed bus can be traced back to something lurking inside your gut that only their proprietary supplement happens to remove. They hold up impressive-looking anatomical diagrams, point enthusiastically at various organs and speak with such unwavering certainty that you’d think they had personally designed the human body.
I’ve genuinely seen videos where so-called doctors display diagrams of the female reproductive system with worms apparently cascading out of it as though women have secretly been hosting an annual earthworm convention without the medical profession noticing. Millions of people watch, thousands believe it and hundreds ask where they can buy the treatment. Nobody pauses to ask the rather obvious question of how every gynaecologist on the planet somehow managed to overlook what appears to be my body’s largest invertebrate infestation.
Then there are the wellness gurus. They are perhaps my favourites because their confidence is inversely proportional to their qualifications. Every week they discover another miracle ingredient that “Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know about”. Last month it was sea moss. Before that it was black seed oil. Next month it will probably be powdered Himalayan yak toenails harvested only during a full moon because apparently the pharmaceutical industry possesses limitless power to suppress every naturally occurring substance except the ones conveniently sold through someone’s affiliate link. Yesterday it was someone using a new study to extrapolate that excessive screen time causes ADHD – clearly not understanding the difference between causation and correlation – I’m still waiting for them to clarify my question, but I won’t be holding my breath…
The conspiracy itself never seems to make much economic sense. We are expected to believe that the same companies capable of hiding miracle cures from every doctor, scientist and regulator on Earth are somehow powerless to stop Sharon from Milton Keynes broadcasting the secret to 1.7 million followers between videos reviewing protein pancakes and anti-ageing moisturiser and twerking.
Financial gurus are no better. Spend enough time online and you’ll be assured that working is for fools, pensions are a scam, property is dead, cryptocurrency is the future, cryptocurrency is finished, gold is king, cash is rubbish, the economy is collapsing next Tuesday and the only sensible response is to purchase a £997 online course explaining how they became a millionaire before the age of twenty-three. Curiously, the quickest way they seem able to make money is convincing other people to buy courses explaining how to make money. If their investment strategy were genuinely as infallible as they claim, one wonders why they’re spending twelve hours a day filming themselves in rented Lamborghinis instead of quietly becoming billionaires.
Relationship experts have also flourished. Every disagreement is now labelled “gaslighting”, every awkward conversation becomes “trauma”, any inconsiderate boyfriend is immediately diagnosed as a narcissist by somebody whose only psychological qualification appears to be owning a microphone and having once read half a self-help book while waiting for a flight at Luton airport. Human relationships have always been gloriously complicated, untidy and deeply personal. Social media has somehow reduced them to a series of neat little labels that fit comfortably into sixty-second videos and can be monetised with astonishing efficiency.
Perhaps my personal favourites, however, are the AI experts. It seems extraordinary that a technology which exploded into public consciousness barely a few years ago has already produced hundreds of thousands of people claiming to be “global thought leaders”. Apparently spending a wet weekend prompting ChatGPT now qualifies somebody to predict the future of civilisation. LinkedIn, in particular, has become an Olympic event in competitive expertise. Every week another self-proclaimed visionary announces that artificial intelligence will replace every job by Christmas, eliminate work entirely by Easter or create unimaginable prosperity just after they’ve finished selling tickets to their webinar.
The fascinating thing about genuine experts is that they rarely sound like this. The more someone genuinely understands a subject, the more aware they become of its complexity. Scientists spend enormous amounts of time explaining uncertainty; doctors discuss probabilities rather than guarantees. Aeropsace engineers build safety margins and redundancy systems because they know reality has an irritating habit of refusing to behave exactly as predicted. Academics routinely talks about their mistakes – it turns out that genuine knowledge has a rather humbling effect on people.
Ignorance, on the other hand, often arrives well lit, speaking in absolutes and their dress code would not be found in Debretts…
That is one of the internet’s cruellest tricks: it has trained many people to mistake certainty for expertise. The person saying, “Current evidence suggests…” sounds hesitant. The person declaring, “This is the truth they don’t want you to know,” sounds decisive – the first is almost certainly qualified, the other almost certainly has a kickback on sales.
This is where safeguarding enters the conversation, because this isn’t simply about laughing at internet oddballs wearing white coats bought from Amazon. This is about influence, trust and us all trying to make sense of an increasingly complicated world while being bombarded by thousands of competing voices, all insisting they alone possess the answer. The danger isn’t that one ridiculous video exists, but after seeing the hundredth confident face making the hundredth confident claim, confidence itself begins to look like evidence and not many people have been taught to ask for the evidence.
That should worry every one of us, because social media misinformation rarely arrives looking like a stereotypical chemistry teacher – on the contrary. it arrives looking polished, well-lit, professionally edited and accompanied by dramatic music. It borrows the language of science without understanding the science itself, uses the credibility of respected newspapers, journals, universities and the knowledge of the ancients by quoting them selectively, removing the inconvenient context and replacing nuance with certainty. By the time the original source has explained why the claim is nonsense, the clip has already been viewed five million times, shared half a million times and translated into six languages.
Truth, unfortunately, has always been rather slower than fiction. Social media has simply handed fiction a space rocket – to insanity and beyond…
The manipulation doesn’t stop with medicine, either. Some of the most convincing misinformation isn’t invented from scratch; it’s borrowed from genuine journalism before being quietly taken apart like an old Land Rover in somebody’s garage. A report from The New York Times becomes a screenshot with the headline carefully cropped to remove the important context. An article from New Scientist has a single paragraph highlighted while the six paragraphs explaining why the findings are preliminary mysteriously disappear. A scientific paper involving a handful of laboratory mice somehow becomes “proof” that scientists have confirmed something that no scientist has actually confirmed in human trials. By the time it reaches Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, the original work has been twisted into something the authors themselves would struggle to recognise. It is a bit like taking Shakespeare, removing every other page, replacing Hamlet with Batman and proudly announcing you’ve discovered the original manuscript.
The worrying part is that this isn’t always done maliciously – we are all too aware of the MLM salespeple who genuinely believe what they’re sharing because it fits neatly with what they already wanted to believe and derive an income from. Human beings have always been remarkably talented at collecting evidence for conclusions they’ve already reached – social media simply supercharges that tendency. Once the algorithm notices you enjoy a particular type of content, it enthusiastically serves you more of it until your feed begins to resemble an echo chamber with excellent lighting. Before long, every video confirms the previous one, every article appears to support the same conclusion and every dissenting voice is dismissed as part of “the establishment”. It doesn’t matter whether the subject is nutrition, politics, psychology, finance or online safety; once you’ve fallen into a carefully curated rabbit hole, reality becomes surprisingly difficult to hear over the applause.
There is a delicious irony in all of this. Many of the people shouting loudest about “doing your own research” wouldn’t recognise research if it arrived carrying a clipboard and wearing a university lanyard. Somewhere along the line, “research” stopped meaning reading multiple peer-reviewed studies, evaluating the methodology, considering conflicting evidence and reaching a balanced conclusion. Apparently it now means watching fourteen TikTok videos filmed in someone’s kitchen, three YouTube channels with dramatic background music and a podcast hosted by a man who introduces himself as “The Truth Warrior”. If that’s research, then eating a Pot Noodle makes me a Michelin-starred chef.
This confusion between information and knowledge is becoming one of the defining challenges of our age. We have access to more information than any generation in history, yet that doesn’t automatically make us better informed. Information is simply raw material; knowledge is what happens after you’ve questioned it, tested it, compared it with other evidence and accepted that you might be wrong. In my field of nutraceuticals, we have to adapt supplements to suit people’s stage of life – it’s not a “one size fits all”! Wisdom goes a step further still; it recognises that certainty is often the first casualty of genuine understanding. Social media, however, has quietly reversed the process because ut encourages us to mistake access for expertise and confidence for credibility, leaving us in the peculiar position where somebody who has spent twenty years studying a subject is expected to debate somebody who spent twenty minutes on Google, as though both opinions deserve equal weight.
This morning I saw someone “teaching” yoga doing floor exercises using AI created books to support propping themselves up to do some strange push up completely disregarding the fact that real world books rarely come in conveniently identical sizes and have a tendency to slip… Another exercise encouraged people to squat with both feel flat on the floor and rotate themselves from side to side – “if you can’t squat with your feet flat, just use a child’s toy box to sit on ” they said”…
We appear to have started confusing popularity with truthL a post with two million views somehow feels more believable than one read by two hundred people, despite the fact that history is littered with ideas believed by millions that turned out to be complete nonsense. Popularity has never been a reliable measure of accuracy. If it were, every contestant on Love Island would be teaching behavioural science at Oxford.
Algorithms on social media, of course, couldn’t care less about any of this – they are pieces of engineering with no moral compass. They don’t wake up each morning wondering whether society is becoming better informed because they have been built with the sole end purpose of measuring attention because attention keeps people on platforms, and people on platforms generate advertising revenue for the social media platforms. That isn’t a criticism so much as a business model, however the unintended consequence is that calm, balanced explanations struggle to compete with dramatic certainty. “Current evidence suggests…” simply doesn’t generate the same excitement as “Everything you’ve been told is a lie!” One is intellectually honest, the other is considerably better for engagement statistics.
The result is an environment where genuine experts are placed at a remarkable disadvantage. Imagine spending thirty years studying infectious diseases, carefully explaining probabilities, limitations and emerging evidence, only to find yourself competing for attention against somebody wearing designer scrubs bought online yesterday who claims they can explain the entire field using three emojis and a bottle of apple cider vinegar it would be funny if it weren’t happening every single day.
Behind the Hilt has always argued that safeguarding isn’t just about protecting people from those who deliberately seek to cause harm. It is also about protecting people from those who unintentionally become vectors of harm by spreading misinformation dressed up as expertise. A teenager doesn’t need to encounter an online predator to be put at risk because anyone online giving dangerous health advice, promoting unhealthy body image, encouraging reckless financial decisions or convincing them that professional help should be ignored because “they don’t want you to know the truth”. The damage may look different, but the consequences can be every bit as real and especially for underage children who have been brought up to respect and learn from teachers, parents, coaches, etc.
Perhaps that’s why digital literacy has become one of the most important life skills of the twenty-first century. We teach children to cross roads safely because traffic exists, we teach them to swim because water can be dangerous. Yet we still spend surprisingly little time teaching people how to evaluate information in a world where misinformation is delivered twenty-four hours a day through a device that is never far from them. Knowing how to ask sensible questions has become just as important as knowing the answers.
Who is making this claim?
What evidence supports it?
What qualifications do they actually possess?
Can the information be verified independently?
Are they informing me, or are they selling me something?
If asking those questions becomes second nature, an awful lot of online nonsense begins to collapse under its own weight. None of this means we should stop questioning authority because healthy scepticism is essential in any democratic society. Experts can be wrong, institutions can fail and journalism can make mistakes. Progress often begins because somebody asks an uncomfortable question. The difference is that healthy scepticism demands better evidence; conspiracy thinking rejects evidence altogether unless it supports the conclusion already reached. One strengthens understanding, the other merely strengthens prejudice while pretending to be independent thought. In our field of dreams, let’s not become sheep …
The greatest irony of all is that genuine expertise has become more valuable than ever precisely because the world has become more complicated. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cybersecurity, climate science, digital safety and medicine are not subjects that become easier simply because somebody explains them confidently on Instagram. If anything, they demand greater humility, greater curiosity and a greater willingness to admit when we don’t know something. The people worth listening to are rarely the ones claiming to have all the answers. They’re usually the ones asking thoughtful questions, acknowledging uncertainty and resisting the temptation to reduce complex issues into comforting fairy tales.
So perhaps the next time a self-appointed guru appears on your screen announcing that every doctor has been lying, every scientist is corrupt, every journalist is compromised and only they possess the hidden truth that can be unlocked for the remarkably specific price of £49.99 plus VAT, pause for just a moment. Ask yourself why somebody holding the greatest secret in human history has chosen to reveal it between discount codes, affiliate links and a reminder to “smash that follow button”. If the answer feels faintly ridiculous, that’s probably because it is.
Safeguarding has to evolve alongside technology: the threats, platforms and tactics change, but the principle remains exactly the same. We don’t protect people by teaching them what to think; we hope to protect them by teaching them how to think. We encourage curiosity instead of gullibility, evidence instead of assumption and critical thinking instead of blind acceptance. In an online world overflowing with self-appointed gurus, miracle cures, overnight experts and professional confidence merchants, those skills may be the most valuable qualification any of us will ever earn.
Because despite what social media would have us believe, expertise isn’t measured in followers, verified ticks or viral videos. It is measured in knowledge, experience, intellectual honesty and the courage to say, “I don’t know.” Ironically, that’s something the internet’s loudest experts almost never say. Which, in itself, tells you almost everything you need to know.
