Does social media just reinforce gullibility?

I think many people use Twitter (for example) well, in informative and/or entertaining ways. And I'm never a fan of when essayists just blithely use collective pronouns like "we" and "our." Seems kind of presumptuous, to me. So by no means do I agree with everything in this article. But I do find it thought-provoking, and that's always cool.

Whether you’re R-Patz or a tiresome “influencer activist,” you act in response to an existing appetite: you spin a yarn about getting suspended for school for trying to save some snails, you promote the healing power of “perineum sunning” on Instagram, you tweet progressive-sounding nonsense about queer people in Ukraine that conflates several categories of “marginalized people” in a coloring book-level analysis of the current Russian invasion because the vibes just seem right. It’s what’s expected. Who really cares if it’s not true?

Content is content and all press is good press. Whether Pattinson really did lay down some sick beats in the Batcape is immaterial: Search for the answer and all you’ll find is page after page of music news sites repeating the claim rather than verifying it. Details and nuance don’t make for snappy headlines and successful SEO. And why would they? We’ve seen over and over that there are few genuinely worrisome or irreperable repercussions for lying, grifting, and fabulism online.

It’s no wonder, then, that in the eyes of the wider public, the “blue tick” journalist has fallen far lower in esteem than the entrepreneurial everyman. Unfortunately, both are infected with posters’ disease, or rather, the impulse to literally just say shit; the void of trustworthy news sources has fast been filled by hucksters (Joe Rogan), conspiracists (QAnon), and celebrities from both the right and the nominal left. And the components of critical thinking—the shared understanding of things like context, subtext, hyperbole, and metaphor—have been consistently undermined by the face-value, rapid-response urgency of social media. - Bitch Media