Everybody Has an Opinion. Who Said We Had to Listen?

Everybody has an opinion. That isn’t the modern part. People had opinions around dinner tables, across backyard fences, in pubs, at work and anywhere else two human beings could find something to disagree about. Some of those opinions were informed, some were complete nonsense, and most had a fairly limited distribution system. Your uncle could spend twenty minutes explaining interest rates on Sunday afternoon, but unless somebody invited him onto the evening news, his audience was probably limited to the poor bastards sitting around the table.

What changed wasn’t our ability to have opinions. What changed was our ability to distribute them.

Social media gave almost everybody a microphone, a publishing system and access to an audience that previous generations could barely have imagined. That has done some genuinely good things. Scientists can explain their own work. Tradespeople can show how something is actually done. Veterinarians can make complicated animal-health information understandable. People with knowledge or perspectives that traditional media would never have bothered with can reach millions without first asking a gatekeeper for permission.

I don’t want those gates back. Plenty of worthwhile people were kept outside them for all sorts of lousy reasons, while plenty of people inside the gates were treated as authorities they hadn’t necessarily earned. A television studio, newspaper column or impressive title was never magical proof that somebody knew what they were talking about.

But we created a different problem when we democratised the ability to speak. We made it easier than ever to hear everybody, and somewhere along the way we started confusing the right to speak with a reason to listen.

That is not quite the same question I was asking in Why We Bite on the Bullshit. That article was about the claim: why can an intelligent person believe something questionable, exaggerated or simply wrong? This question comes one step earlier. Before I even decide whether the claim is believable, how did the person making it acquire authority in my head?

Because visibility isn’t authority. Familiarity isn’t expertise. Influence isn’t competence. And a large audience proves, at minimum, that somebody has become very good at attracting or keeping a large audience. That isn’t nothing. In fact, a substantial audience sustained over years may be evidence that the person is consistently delivering something people value. The mistake is deciding that whatever created that audience also qualifies the person to speak authoritatively about whatever subject happens to be on today’s menu.

Style Gets There First

There is an old expression I grew up with: if you’re going to talk the talk, you’d better be able to walk the walk. It wasn’t particularly sophisticated, but the standard behind it was useful. Talking was the claim. Walking was the evidence. If you kept telling people you knew what you were doing, eventually somebody was entitled to ask you to demonstrate it.

The modern attention economy has made us extraordinarily good at the talking part. Somebody can be polished, confident, funny and terrific on camera. They can have professional lighting, a microphone that looks as though NATO is waiting for their briefing, a million followers and thousands of people agreeing with them underneath every video. After appearing in your feed often enough, they may even start to feel familiar.

None of that is meaningless. Communication is a real skill. Building an audience is difficult. Being able to explain something clearly enough that people willingly come back tomorrow is valuable. Some influencers are exceptionally good communicators, and some are also genuine experts in the subjects they cover. Research on influencer relationships has found that things such as perceived authenticity and informative value can contribute to the trust audiences develop in creators.

The trouble is that style has one enormous advantage over substance: style is much easier to see. You can assess the presentation within seconds. This person sounds certain. Other people seem to trust them. They have an enormous following. The video is polished. They speak fluently and don’t appear to hesitate. All of that can add up to a very quick impression: this person looks like they know what they’re doing.

Substance asks the harder question: Do they really? Prove it.

I don’t mean, “Show me your degree and everybody else can shut up.” Credentials matter when they represent meaningful training and demonstrated competence, but they aren’t the only way people learn anything. Someone who has spent thirty years doing a job may understand parts of it better than somebody who studied it last year. A serious amateur can acquire formidable knowledge. Qualified professionals can be wrong. Experts can disagree, and institutions can fail.

Proof can therefore take different forms. It might be formal training, years of relevant experience, demonstrated results, sound evidence, a body of work or reasoning that survives scrutiny. Sometimes one of the strongest signs that somebody knows a subject is that they understand where their knowledge stops and can say, without bursting into flames, “I don’t know.” What proof cannot be is simply the appearance of proof.

That matters because human beings do use shortcuts when deciding what seems credible. Research on the illusory truth effect has repeatedly found that previously encountered statements can seem more truthful than unfamiliar ones simply because they have been encountered before. That doesn’t mean repetition hypnotises us, or that seeing the same influencer every morning means we’ll believe everything they say. It does mean familiarity and truth are not the same thing, even though familiarity can affect how information feels. Modern media is awfully good at giving us familiarity.

Being Good at Attention Is Still Being Good at Something

This is where I think criticism of influencers often becomes lazy. Calling somebody “just an influencer” ignores the possibility that they have become remarkably good at communication, entertainment, marketing, community building or understanding what people care about. Those are real skills, whether we personally admire them or not.

Reality television was an earlier and very visible part of the same cultural shift. It certainly didn’t invent fame without expertise; human beings had managed that trick long before anybody put cameras into a house full of strangers. But it helped make personality itself a product. You could become famous because people found you compelling enough to keep watching, and social media eventually removed even the need for a television network to decide that you deserved the opportunity.

There isn’t anything inherently wrong with that. If somebody can entertain ten million people, they have demonstrated an ability to entertain ten million people. The problem begins when we start treating fame itself as evidence that the person deserves authority somewhere else.

If a person has built an audience of two million people, they’ve almost certainly become good at something. Maybe they’re funny. Maybe they’re an extraordinary storyteller. Maybe they understand fashion, fitness, photography or marketing. Maybe they actually are a leading authority in their field and social media finally gave them the distribution they deserved.

But if tomorrow they start explaining cancer treatment, German Shepherd behaviour, investment strategy or monetary policy, we’re dealing with a new question. What made them influential may have nothing to do with what makes them qualified on that particular subject.

A veterinarian has given me a very good reason to pay attention when she’s discussing animal health. That qualification doesn’t make her my first choice when the transmission starts making a noise. A successful entrepreneur may know a tremendous amount about building companies, but success in business does not quietly confer a second degree in epidemiology when somebody hands him a podcast microphone. Authority has a subject attached to it, even if the feed makes that easy to forget.

Everybody Arrives in the Same Little Box

Open almost any social platform and think about who can appear one after another. You might see a scientist who has spent twenty years studying a subject, followed by a comedian, a journalist, a physician, a hobbyist, a celebrity, somebody selling supplements and a fellow who discovered the subject last Tuesday but has already developed remarkably strong feelings about it. They all arrive through much the same publishing machinery: a face, a video or post, an audience count and a collection of reactions underneath.

The machinery can tell you that people are watching. What it cannot tell you, by itself, is what reason you have to trust that particular person on that particular subject. Recommendation systems are not credentialing systems. Platforms use many signals to decide what people are likely to watch, enjoy or find relevant; reducing all of that to “the algorithm rewards likes” would be nonsense. But none of those systems can relieve us of the separate job of deciding whether somebody actually knows the subject they’re talking about.

Health information makes the problem particularly easy to see. Pew Research Center reported in 2026 that four in ten U.S. adults say they get health-and-wellness information from social-media influencers or podcasts, including half of adults under 50. Pew’s analysis also found a mixed group of health-and-wellness creators, including healthcare professionals, coaches and entrepreneurs.

That is not evidence that social media is ruining healthcare. In fact, many people who consume health-and-wellness material from influencers say it helps them understand health better. Plenty of doctors and other qualified professionals are using these platforms brilliantly. The point is simply that useful expertise and questionable expertise can arrive through the same screen, often with remarkably similar presentation, and the screen itself cannot tell us how much authority the person deserves.

And you can see what happens when that blurred line between information and authority follows us off the screen and into the doctor’s office.

Dr. Google Already Has a Diagnosis

Medicine gives us a particularly good example of the difference between being informed and deciding we’ve become the authority ourselves.

There is nothing wrong with researching your own health. I’ve dealt with enough doctors to know that informed patients sometimes need to advocate for themselves, ask better questions, challenge assumptions and seek another opinion. Doctors are human beings. They miss things, they disagree and they do not acquire omniscience along with the white coat.

But there is a considerable difference between walking into an appointment and saying, “I’ve been reading about this and I’m wondering whether it could explain what’s happening,” and walking in effectively saying, “I already know what’s wrong with me; I’ve just come here for you to agree.”

A 2024 systematic review of physicians’ experiences with internet-informed patients found that doctors often recognised benefits when patients were better informed and able to participate more actively in their care. Problems were more likely when patients arrived with fixed conclusions or inappropriate requests, or when physicians had to spend consultation time assessing and correcting information brought in from online sources.

That makes perfect sense to me. Doing your homework can improve the conversation. Doing your homework and then appointing yourself chief of medicine is another matter. The distinction isn’t between an obedient patient and a questioning patient; it’s between “Here is what I’ve learned; help me understand it” and “Here is what I’ve decided; confirm it.” In the second version, the authority decision has already been made before the person with the relevant expertise gets a chance to speak.

Apparently Owning One Dog Is Also a Qualification

German Shepherd groups may be the purest version of the same phenomenon because apparently nothing gives a human being greater confidence in canine behaviour than having once lived with a dog.

Someone posts that their German Shepherd has suddenly started growling at their husband and asks what to do. Before long the answers cover dominance, fear, protection, trauma, neutering, diet, exercise, collars, leadership, resource guarding and probably the position of Mercury if the thread stays open long enough.

Meanwhile, almost nobody answering has met the dog. They don’t know the dog’s medical history, previous behaviour, environment, triggers, medications, body language or what happened immediately before the growl. They may be enormously experienced owners and may offer useful possibilities. They may also be diagnosing an eighty-pound animal from six sentences and a photograph.

That doesn’t make owner communities useless. Far from it. Experienced shepherd people can recognise patterns, reassure a worried owner when something is perfectly normal and sometimes point somebody toward a question they hadn’t thought to ask. I use other people’s experience myself. The mistake would be pretending all experience carries the same weight for every problem.

Sometimes the answer really is, “Ask somebody who can assess the dog.” That might be a veterinarian when health or pain could be involved, or an appropriately qualified behaviour professional. For perspective, the Certification Council for Professional Dog Trainers requires candidates for its CBCC-KA behaviour-consultant credential to document at least 300 hours of canine behaviour consulting experience involving issues such as fear, anxiety and aggression before they are eligible for the examination.

Now compare that with 300 people in a Facebook thread. The numbers may be similar, but the numbers are not the qualification.

Money Has a Way of Clarifying the Stakes

Financial advice exposes the same confusion with considerably less room for pretending the consequences don’t matter. The Ontario Securities Commission surveyed 655 Canadian retail investors and reported that about 35% said they had made a financial decision based on advice from a financial influencer.

That doesn’t mean a person with a YouTube channel cannot know finance, and it certainly doesn’t mean a traditional financial professional automatically deserves blind trust. It means popularity, reach and financial competence are separate things.

You wouldn’t normally choose an accountant because she has the best dance videos. Yet put financial advice into a polished enough video and surround it with an enormous audience, and popularity itself can begin to feel like part of the evidence. Maybe the creator really is excellent and maybe the audience grew because years of useful work earned it. Good. Audience size can tell us something. It just doesn’t finish the argument.

The Problem Was Never That Everybody Got a Microphone

It would be very easy to turn this whole argument into nostalgia for a world that wasn’t nearly as good as we remember it.

The old gatekeepers did not always identify the best voices. They often identified the voices that looked familiar to the people already holding the keys. Social media has allowed skilled tradespeople, independent researchers, small-business owners, patients, teachers, specialists and countless others to contribute knowledge that might never have reached a large audience before. Some people who began as amateurs became experts through years of serious study and work. Some of the best experts around are also excellent influencers.

So the answer cannot be, “Only listen to official people,” and it isn’t “Distrust everybody” either. The harder answer is that we have to stop letting easy-to-see signals answer questions they were never capable of answering. A follower count tells us something about reach. Confidence tells us something about presentation. Familiarity tells us we’ve encountered the person before. Credentials can tell us something meaningful about training. Experience can tell us something meaningful about practice. None of those should be asked to do more work than they can actually support.

When I listen to somebody now, the question I want to get better at asking isn’t whether I like them, whether they’re popular or even whether they sound convincing. It’s whether there is enough substance underneath the performance to justify the authority I’m about to give them.

Do they really know what they’re talking about?

Prove it.

Not because I want to catch them out, but because attention and authority were never supposed to be the same thing.

Build Somewhere the Work Can Speak

There is another reason this matters to me now that I’m building an online business.

Social media is terrific for distribution. I’m using it myself for exactly that reason, so it would be a little rich for me to stand here pretending I’m above the attention economy. If Facebook or Pinterest can introduce somebody to something useful I’ve written, that’s precisely what I want them to do.

What I don’t want is to build the entire business around shouting into somebody else’s algorithm. Attention on a platform is rented. Formats change, feeds move on and yesterday’s post gets buried underneath whatever arrived this morning. You can become extremely good at getting attention there and still have very little that accumulates anywhere you control.

A website doesn’t magically solve the authority problem. Owning a domain no more makes me an expert than owning a microphone does. What it gives me is somewhere to demonstrate whatever substance I actually have.

A reader can see the full argument instead of a thirty-second clip. They can look at the sources, read what else I’ve written, see whether the thinking holds together and discover whether there is a body of useful work behind the presentation. Over time, explanations, tutorials, experience, evidence, corrections and results can accumulate in one place. That is why ownership matters to me: social platforms can help people discover the work, but the work itself needs somewhere permanent to live.

Style still matters. Of course it does. If nobody notices what you’ve built, substance can sit quietly in a corner congratulating itself for years. But style should get the introduction, not the final say. Once somebody has our attention, what keeps that attention worth having is whether there is actually something underneath the presentation.

We gave everybody a microphone. That was probably a good thing.

The microphone was never the proof.