The people who fall for it

One · What happened

The American number held while others rose

Pew’s report on the survey covers thirty-seven countries and compares many of them with 2022. Respondents in each were asked whether social media has been a good thing or a bad thing for democracy in their country. In the United States 64% said bad, the same share as in 2022, when Americans were the most negative of any public Pew polled. The next most negative that year were the Dutch at 54%, ten points lower.

Pew puts the Netherlands at 70% now, up from 54% in 2022 and higher than the United States. France moved from 51% to 65% and Germany from 41% to 61%. The median across the thirty-seven countries is 35%. Sixteen of the twenty-six countries with data from 2022 or 2023 now have more people saying social media is bad for democracy.

Pew asked about opinions and reports nothing about what social media did to any election. A reader can hold the 64% as a fact about what Americans think and add no claim to it. Which platforms to regulate and whose posts count as the false ones are arguments for lawmakers and campaigns, and no single poll of ordinary adults was ever going to settle them. Pew did not try. The 87% counts Americans who think the technology has made people easier to fool.

Two · What it is doing

The faces behind the number

“Easy to manipulate with false information and rumors” is how Pew words one of the effects that respondents in thirty-seven countries were asked to judge. The phrase names no particular people. A reader who agrees with it has to supply some, and the ones he supplies say something about him. Another 68% told Pew that the same tools have made people more informed about current events. A man can hold both answers by sorting everybody he knows into the informed and the fooled and placing himself among the informed.

Pew found 81% of Americans saying that the internet and social media have made people more divided in their political opinions. A post that confirms what a man already believes takes a second to forward. One he doubts asks for a search and a decision, and most of those get a scroll and nothing more. The stories that travel under that arrangement are the ones that make the sender feel right.

Picturing other people as fooled brings a small, steady pleasure. It lets a man feel clear-headed when he has checked nothing. He can look at a relative or a rival party with a smile that is half pity and half contempt. Contempt of that sort is a sin in anybody, and a man can carry it for weeks and never raise his voice at another human being. Among the 64%, some will land on a darker conclusion, that no source can be believed. A man who lands there has stopped looking for the truth and calls the stopping wisdom.

Three · Where the ground is

The man who is wise in his own eyes

“Do you see a man who is wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him,” Solomon writes (Proverbs 26:12). The fool in Proverbs is the man who will not take correction, and the proverb puts a man who trusts his own clear sight in a worse position than that fool. Nothing in the verse requires him to be wrong about the facts. He can be right about a particular rumor and still fit the verse if he has decided that checking is for other people.

“[M]ore noble than those in Thessalonica,” Luke says of the Jews in Berea (Acts 17:11). They listened to Paul with eagerness and then went to the Scriptures every day to see if what he said was so. The man they examined was an apostle standing in their own synagogue, and a post from a stranger can stand a check against the same text. Solomon’s proverb is shorter and carries the same weight. “The simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps” (Proverbs 14:15).

The one who thinks he stands

Paul had just reminded the Corinthians that Israel ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink, yet God was not pleased with most of them (1 Corinthians 10:1–5). His warning is for the secure. A believer who reads the Pew numbers sure that the fooled are somewhere else fits that description. The question covered people in general, himself included. “[L]et anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall,” Paul writes (1 Corinthians 10:12).

Paul says in Romans 5:6 that Christ died for the ungodly. The ungodly include the man who forwarded a false report about a neighbor and the man who sneered at his brother for believing one. The hope in that verse stays in place if the feed never improves. A pastor or an older man in the congregation can hear that confession and read the psalm about who may dwell in the LORD’s tent. He is the one “who does not slander with his tongue and does no evil to his neighbor, nor takes up a reproach against his friend,” David writes (Psalm 15:3).

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Five jobs for the coming week, three of them done in person with somebody else.

1. 01

   Take one thing back from whoever got it from you.

   Open the last month of what you forwarded or reposted and find the one you checked least. If it came from an account that cannot be traced to somebody who saw the thing happen, send the people who got it a short correction. In Matthew 12:36 Jesus says that “people will give account for every careless word they speak,” and a forwarded post is made of words.

2. 02

   Tell a brother which group you picture.

   Ask a man from your church to coffee and name the people you had in mind when you read the 87%. Tell him if the picture comes with pity or with contempt. He can pray with you right there at the table and ask you in a month how the picture has changed. In James 5:16 believers are told to “confess your sins to one another and pray for one another.”

3. 03

   Spend an hour with the one you think has been taken in.

   Pick the person in your family or on your street who believes what you think is false. Ask where he reads it and who he trusts there. Correct nothing in that hour. The point is to find out what he believes and why.

4. 04

   Read about the Bereans before you open the feed.

   Tomorrow morning, read Acts 17:10–15 before the phone gets picked up. Then choose one claim you have believed this month. Look for it in a primary source, such as a court filing or the release of the agency that did the counting. Write down what you found and the name of the source that said it.

5. 05

   Go knock on one door on your street.

   Take twenty minutes you would have spent scrolling and spend them at the door of a neighbor you have not met. Ask how long they have lived there and leave it at that. The houses closest to yours are the easiest ones to reach on foot with nothing in your hands. Jesus gives the second commandment as “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39).