Social Media Distortion Dilemma
I watched a 17-year-old explain how he was running about twenty YouTube channels. One covered the Russia–Ukraine war. He didn’t know much about it and didn’t care to. He just saw that it performed. He copied a successful channel, ran scripts through AI voiceover, pulled royalty free footage, reused the same keywords, and made about six thousand dollars in his first month from that one channel.
He wasn’t trying to shape geopolitics. He was trying to make money. Multiply him by thousands and you start to see how much of the internet actually works.
When something trends, people assume it must matter. But a lot of what looks like organic interest is just manufactured volume. Not by masterminds. By ordinary people chasing ordinary incentives. Attention pays. So once a topic heats up, creators flood it... solo operators, small teams, content farms. The algorithm pushes the surge, the surge creates more interest, and what looks like a movement is often just a market cycle. You saw it with Nephilim, forbidden books, cryptids. A few hits convert, others copy, and the copies make the thing look bigger than it is.
That’s the first distortion: scale. The second is what this does to people.
Fast, cheap information puffs people up. You can binge a niche for a few weeks, learn the jargon, watch the explainers, and feel like you’ve developed insight. But that kind of knowledge usually produces confidence without proportion. People absorb enough to feel fluent and then start speaking like experts. Fluency isn’t understanding, and the gap between the two is where overconfidence lives.
Spurgeon saw this long before the internet. “Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading,” he wrote. His advice was to go deep rather than wide: master a few books instead of skimming many. Depth breeds caution. Surface exposure breeds certainty. The person who’s gone deep knows what he doesn’t know. The person who’s only skimmed doesn’t, and that’s why he’s so sure. Elsewhere, Spurgeon wrote, “He who knows nothing is confident in everything; hence they are bullheaded beyond measure.”
It gets stronger when the content is framed as hidden truth. If something is presented as what “they don’t want you to know,” discovering it feels like initiation. You’re not just informed. You’re awake. That identity makes people more invested and more dismissive of anyone outside the niche. Now you’ve got two distortions reinforcing each other: the topic is exaggerated in scale, and the people consuming it feel like experts.
Most aren’t malicious. Many are sincere. But sincerity doesn’t fix distortion. You can be earnest and still be inside a bubble.
Such is our dilemma.
This is what I have been trying to put my finger on.
In general, I have become annoyed with this influencer economy we’ve created where we reward individuals for successfully attracting our attention, often away from our priorities and towards things we can do very little about.
Really good stuff! I see this in young Christian guys I meet with who have been ‘disciples by the Christian algorithm’ who are so overly confident in what they’ve learned from their ‘YouTube seminary degree’. There’s not a lot of room for humility and I can tell there is no depth when it comes to actually understanding Scripture on the whole. Thanks for sharing.