Umberto Eco warned that social media has turned the public sphere into a place where “a legion of idiots” speak with the same confidence and equal rights as Nobel Prize winners.
Kabul 24: A space in which the boundary between knowledge and ignorance collapses, and the weight of discourse is determined not by the depth of understanding, but by the intensity of the noise.
Although I consider freedom of expression a fundamental civil and human right, I share Eco’s concern. Social media has not created a field for rational dialogue, but rather a mob-like, ochlocratic condition: a space where the hierarchy of knowledge is overturned, and the public sphere falls under the colonization of those who, without any methodical understanding, speak loudly and with absolute certainty.
In such an environment, if someone who has specialized in a field and spent years in deep and precise study publishes an essay on Facebook, they are immediately confronted by a group of readers who possess neither methodical knowledge nor the ability to distance themselves from prejudices rooted in their ideological biases.
Instead of speaking within an epistemic framework, these people respond with raw, emotional, and sometimes insulting reactions. Nonsense, mockery, and laughing emojis replace argument.
What is particularly alarming is that this very group assumes an air of self-righteousness, fully convinced that their judgment is superior and their position is the absolute truth—while they have received no training and have established no epistemological relationship with the issue at hand.
These groups are not merely problematic at the individual level; within the media structure, they turn into minor yet influential celebrities. Individuals who gain prominence not through expertise, but by relying on a large crowd of like-minded followers, thereby creating echo chambers.
In the “echo chamber,” the same crude opinion is greeted with a wave of approvals that lack any epistemic foundation, lending it a false sense of legitimacy.
This collective validation not only strengthens false beliefs, but transforms them into the individual’s intellectual identity—a process that ultimately leads to the widespread dissemination of misunderstanding, prejudice, and the production of even more extreme versions of the original ignorance.
As a result, those who have read, thought, and written about a subject for years are not only ignored, but easily ridiculed.
The final outcome is that the public sphere is emptied of the logic of rational dialogue and falls under the occupation of a legion of loud yet empty voices.
Exactly what Umberto Eco called the colonization of the public sphere by idiots. In such a situation, truth is defined not by reasoning, but by the number of likes—and this may be the most dangerous form of the decline of rationality in the digital age.—The “public sphere” is the term for Jürgen Habermas’s Public Sphere, which can also be translated as “public space” or “common sphere.”
Jamshid Mehrpur — Kabul
