Not Every Voice Deserves an Audience
This morning, I read an article about manicures.
Not how to choose the right nail shape. Not the best nude polish for your skin tone.
An actual three-page debate about whether the growing preference for “natural-looking” nails is, in fact, a classist and racist beauty standard designed to make Asian and women of colour feel inferior.
Then I moved on to Indian politics.
Then AI and the possibility of human extinction.
Then dog-training tips.
All before breakfast.
And somewhere between reading about manicures and the possible end of humanity, I had a thought:
Thirty years ago, if I wanted to expose myself to this breadth of ideas, I would've needed access to a number of publications, journalists, specialists and libraries. I would have had to pay for many of them. I would have had to deliberately seek them out.
Today, all I need is an internet connection.
That is extraordinary!
The internet has done something revolutionary by democratising access to information.
But, there are two democratisations that have happened, and we often confuse them.
1. Democratisation of access
Anyone with an internet connection can find information that was previously expensive, geographically restricted or institutionally gated.
2. Democratisation of publication
Almost anyone can now publish an opinion, interpretation, analysis, accusation, theory or “expert” take and potentially put it in front of thousands or millions of people.
And honestly, the first one is brilliant. The second one is where I think things get messy.
Because access to a publishing platform is not the same thing as intellectual credibility.
I once read the line, “Not everyone deserves a public voice.”
It sounds shocking when taken literally. It almost sounds like we're saying not everyone should have the right to speak. But the more you think about the idea behind it, the more you understand that it is perhaps trying to say, "Everyone should have the right to speak. But not every voice should automatically be given the same weight."
The problem isn't that ordinary people suddenly have voices. The problem is that our ability to tell the difference between a well-researched argument and a confidently expressed opinion has become questionable.
We have increasingly blurred the line between having something to say and having something worth saying.
A person can now:
read three articles and call it research
repeat an opinion and call it a fact
quote a statistic without understanding what it measures
find five sources that agree with them and assume that means they're correct
mistake fluency for expertise
mistake virality for credibility
mistake confidence for knowledge
mistake an AI-generated answer for verified information
and mistake having access to information for having understood it
Which brings me to something we need to talk about much more, earned credibility.
We have spent years talking about freedom of speech. And perhaps now we need to talk about responsibility of speech. Because if I publish something to an audience of ten people, the consequences of being careless may be limited. But If I publish something that reaches ten thousand people, a hundred thousand people, or millions, the consequesnces change. And so should my responsibility.
Not because I'm not allowed to have a voice, but because influence must come with responsibility.
If I am going to present something as fact, have I actually checked it?
If I am going to interpret research, have I read beyond the headline?
If I am going to quote a statistic, do I understand the population, context and limitations behind it?
If I am going to make a serious allegation, what evidence am I basing it on?
And perhaps most importantly:
Am I sharing this because it is true, because it is useful, or simply because it makes people want to click?
When attention is the economic currency, even reputed media sources find themselves moving away from "what is worth knowing" to "what makes people click".
And there is a difference between the two. Clickbait isn't merely irritating. Research has found that sensationalised headlines can affect how people comprehend and remember the information beneath them.
At the same time, research into digital media literacy has shown that people can become better at distinguishing between higher-quality and lower-quality information when they are taught how to evaluate what they find online.
Then perhaps the answer isn't to go backwards. We cannot, and should not, put the gatekeepers back in place because the internet has become noisy.
The answer may lie in better digital literacy.
Not just the ability to find information, but to interrogate it.
Who wrote this? Why was it written? What is fact, and what is interpretation?
What is the evidence? Who benefits from me believing this?
And, am I looking for information, or for confirmation of what I already believe?
Because the greatest danger of an infinitely searchable internet may not be that we can't find the truth.It may be that we can always find something that agrees with us.
And that is where critical thinking becomes more important than ever.
Perhaps that is the paradox of the information age: we have never had more information at our fingertips, and yet we have never had to work harder to know what to believe.
Everyone has a voice.
But perhaps the real skill we need to cultivate now is not learning how to speak louder.
It is learning when to speak, what to say, what to believe, and when to say, “I don't know.”
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