Welcome to the internet, humanity’s most magnificent achievement in information storage—a vast digital library containing the sum of human knowledge, alongside the sum of human delusion, helpfully arranged in no particular order whatsoever.

Never before in history have we had such unprecedented access to information. Want to know how photosynthesis works? It’s there. Curious about the mating habits of Antarctic penguins? Also there. Fancy learning why your neighbour’s leaf blower is actually a government mind-control device? Well, that’s there too, nestled comfortably between peer-reviewed research papers and someone’s passionate dissertation on why birds aren’t real.

The Confirmation Bias Café

Our digital library comes with a rather unique feature: a personalised curator who only shows you books you’ll enjoy. This curator—let’s call him Algorithm—has studied your reading habits with the dedication of a stalker and the commercial instincts of a used car salesman. He’s noticed you quite fancy conspiracy theories about breakfast cereals, so he’ll make sure you never accidentally stumble across any tedious research about actual nutrition science.

Confirmation bias, that most human of cognitive quirks, has found its perfect enabler in our digital age (Nickerson, 1998). We don’t visit libraries to challenge our beliefs anymore; we visit them to have our beliefs enthusiastically validated by increasingly niche echo chambers. It’s rather like having a personal yes-man, except this yes-man has access to millions of other yes-men, all nodding in unison.

The Democracy of Misinformation

Here’s where things get deliciously absurd: in our greatest library, anyone can be an author. Fancy writing a compelling piece about how vaccines cause autism? Simply ignore the overwhelming scientific consensus (Hviid et al., 2019; Taylor et al., 2014) and publish away! Your work will be lovingly indexed, searchable, and recommended to precisely the people most likely to believe it.

The beauty of this system is its democratic nature. Why should expertise matter when passion will suffice? A mother’s heartfelt blog post about vaccine dangers carries the same digital weight as decades of immunological research. After all, who are we to say that Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent study (which cost him his medical licence) is less valid than the dozens of studies involving millions of children that found no link between vaccines and autism?

The Spinach-Measles Hypothesis: A Case Study

Allow me to demonstrate how effortlessly one can contribute to humanity’s knowledge base. I could, this very afternoon, publish a blog post titled “The Hidden Danger in Your Salad: How Big Spinach Covers Up the Measles Connection.” I’d include some compelling personal anecdotes (my cousin ate spinach and later developed measles—coincidence?), cherry-pick some irrelevant statistics about iron absorption, and perhaps reference a completely unrelated study about leafy vegetables.

Within weeks, this masterpiece would be indexed by search engines, shared on social media, and algorithmically recommended to anyone who’s ever shown interest in “natural health” or “government cover-ups.” Before long, there’d be entire Facebook groups dedicated to spinach avoidance, complete with testimonials from parents whose children definitely developed measles after eating that suspicious-looking salad.

The Circular Citation Circus

The most delightful aspect of our digital library is how misinformation breeds. Once my spinach-measles hypothesis gains traction, other “researchers” will cite it in their own groundbreaking work. Perhaps they’ll discover that kale causes chicken pox, or that rocket leaves are responsible for the common cold. Soon, we’ll have an entire body of “literature” supporting the vegetable-disease connection, all traceable back to one bored blogger’s afternoon of creative writing.

This creates what researchers call “circular reporting”—when misinformation appears credible simply because it’s been repeated enough times (Silverman, 2015). It’s rather like playing Chinese whispers, except the whispers are preserved forever and indexed by Google.

The Algorithm’s Dilemma

Our digital librarians—these algorithms—face a peculiar challenge. They’re designed to give people what they want, not what they need. And what people want, it turns out, is information that makes them feel clever for believing it (Vosoughi et al., 2018). Truth, meanwhile, is often rather dull and inconveniently complex.

So our algorithms, being the obliging servants they are, learn to serve up increasingly niche and extreme content. Start with a mild interest in natural remedies, and you’ll soon be recommended videos explaining why doctors are actually lizard people in disguise. It’s personalised radicalisation, delivered with the efficiency of Amazon Prime.

The Democratisation of Expertise

In our digital library, everyone’s an expert. Spent five minutes on WebMD? You’re practically a doctor. Read three blog posts about climate change? You’re qualified to debate atmospheric physicists. Watched a YouTube video about economics? Time to school those silly Nobel laureates.

This democratisation of expertise might seem progressive, but it’s rather like giving everyone access to perform surgery simply because they’ve watched medical dramas on television. The confidence is there; the competence, less so.

The Way Forward (Or Backward, Depending on Your Algorithm)

So here we are, citizens of the information age, drowning in data whilst thirsting for knowledge. We’ve built humanity’s greatest library, then hired drunk toddlers to organise it and militant partisans to recommend books.

The irony is exquisite: we have more access to reliable information than any generation in history, yet we’re increasingly misinformed. We can fact-check anything in seconds, yet we fact-check nothing. We have the tools to be the most educated society ever, yet we’re fracturing into tribes defined by increasingly bizarre beliefs about everything from vaccines to vegetables.

Perhaps the solution isn’t better algorithms or stricter fact-checking, but simply admitting what we’ve created: not a library, but a hall of mirrors, where every reflection confirms exactly what we hoped to see.

After all, why seek truth when you can simply search for validation?

---

References

Hviid, A., Hansen, J. V., Frisch, M., & Melbye, M. (2019). Measles, mumps, rubella vaccination and autism: A nationwide cohort study. Annals of Internal Medicine, 170(8), 513-520.

Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175-220.

Silverman, C. (2015). Lies, damn lies, and viral content: How news websites spread (and debunk) online rumours, unverified claims and misinformation. Columbia Journalism School.

Taylor, L. E., Swerdfeger, A. L., & Eslick, G. D. (2014). Vaccines are not associated with autism: An evidence-based meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies. Vaccine, 32(29), 3623-3629.

Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146-1151.