Is social media making us stupid?

It’s a mystery to me how so many people can no longer think critically. Or maybe they never could, and it’s just become more obvious. How many of these lines have you recently heard:
"It's true! I heard it on a podcast."
"Sugar feeds cancer. I saw it on Tiktok."
"Celebrity X swears by it, and look how well (s)he is ageing."
"Don't you know? X will make you live longer!"
 
Other than retail, does anyone appreciate the rise of “influencers?” These people who, for often nebulous reasons, become the voice that all wish to follow, Pied-Pipers with hypnotic masses blindly traipsing behind. They’ve got advice on everything from food to fashion to pharmaceuticals. The main message, generally: your life could be so much better, if only you___(fill in the blank: Use an infrared face mask. Buy this special pillow. Take peptides/creatine/vitamin megadoses/energy drinks. Use a specific cream with an unpronounceable magic ingredient. Do an “essential” exercise. Bleach your anus). These influencers generally have no specific expertise, but even if they do (eg. the MDs), they are hustling a product, just like the snake oil sellers of old. It’s a tale as old as time, only much, much easier to sell to millions of people.

Likely, charlatans will always exist. My issue is that people–smart, educated people, some of them–are buying in so quickly. Believing that the three exercises with five reps per day will transform them into the person bulging with muscles (whose photos might be edited). Believing that the “incredible” supplement will make them bigger/smaller/faster/stronger/sexier/pain free/cancer free…sometimes all of the above! Who wouldn’t want that?
 
Some people will ask a few questions after watching Tiktok, will look up a couple of items online, will say “I’ve done my research” when the only actual “evidence” is a study of five people in Taiwan who were paid by the product makers. Many don’t realize that influencers may not even use the product or service they’re pushing, that whatever appealing characteristics influencers possess already existed and were in fact the reason they were approached to do the sales in the first place. Do people also think that the perfect white sock in the Tide commercial is actually a result of washing with Tide? Does anyone truly believe that one single substance can cure symptoms of every malady from multiple sclerosis to halitosis, and doctors are just keeping it a secret to save their jobs?
 
“I did a search, and Google showed research verifying the results,” I’ve been told, and good on them for taking a moment (thirty seconds, even) to think hmmmmm. But even these “deep divers” fail to realize that their search includes information mined by profit-driven companies to support the sale of their product; studies that may or may not follow scientific protocols, that may have been plucked out of a pool of a hundred other studies with opposite results, that may not even have used real data.
 
Can these questionable things happen in true, scientific research? Yes, they can, and are often emphasized to discount actual science, but the whole purpose of peer-reviewed journals is to verify data and methodology and even ensure results are reproducible. To answer questions in the most accurate, free-of-bias way possible. Thanks to AI, the references are there, if you care to wade through the nonsense and read them.
 
Finding this information, doing this research, is hard work. Putting thought into our decisions takes time and effort. It’s so much easier to just do what the influencer says, to follow someone else, let Instagram make the decisions. But look around you for even a few minutes (South of us, perhaps) and I think you’ll see that this easy, “follower” way of non-thinking is not making our world a better place.