Information is no longer scarce. It’s abundant, immediate and increasingly unfiltered. Social media has become the first place most people turn for news, and the platforms behind it are built to push out new information constantly, whether or not it’s been verified.
Here’s the problem: good decisions take time. They require a pause, a moment to weigh what we actually know against what we don’t and the willingness to change our minds if the evidence calls for it. Social media doesn’t give us that. It rewards speed, not judgment. Whoever reacts first wins, not whoever reasons best. In the absence of real evidence, we let confidence stand in for it. A post that sounds certain feels true to us, no matter what’s actually behind it, because we respond to tone, not substance. The algorithm only makes this worse. It doesn’t show us a claim once. It shows it to us again and again, from different accounts, until the repetition starts to feel like proof, even when nothing has actually been confirmed. Once we’ve posted an opinion publicly, taking it back gets harder, not because the facts changed, but because admitting we were wrong now means admitting it in front of an audience, so we dig in instead.
That played out clearly in the case of Lindsay Clancy. In Massachusetts, a jury sat through seven weeks of testimony and more than thirty-five hours of deliberation, working through medical evidence, timelines and the weight of a case few outside that courtroom will ever fully understand. In the end, they couldn’t agree. The trial ended in a mistrial, with eleven jurors on one side and a single holdout on the other. Meanwhile, people hundreds of miles away, many of whom had never read a court filing, sat through testimony or spoken with anyone involved, had already made up their minds. Some were certain Clancy was guilty beyond question. Others were certain she was a victim of an illness no one had properly prepared her for. In nearly every case, the certainty online outpaced the actual information behind it.
That raises a real question: Is it better to be informed this way, fast and constant? There’s a legitimate case for yes. A courtroom update that once took a full news cycle to reach the public can now arrive within minutes, and a steady stream of updates can, in theory, build a fuller picture over time than a single evening segment ever could. However, speed isn’t the same as completeness. A feed that never stops updating isn’t necessarily getting closer to the truth. It may just be getting louder.
That’s where the risk comes in because we know that social media strips away the filters that used to stand between a claim and its audience: editors, factcheckers and some measure of accountability for getting it wrong. Anyone can post with total confidence and reach thousands of people, and the platform makes no distinction between someone who followed the trial closely and someone repeating a headline they skimmed. In a case touching on parenthood, mental illness, grief and guilt, that’s a volatile mix. Social media doesn’t need to create the division around a story like this. It just amplifies what’s already there.
The two sides of this meet at the same point: what makes social media fast is exactly what makes it unreliable. Strip away the friction, the editing, the second sources, the waiting, and speed is what you get, but so is noise traveling at the same pace as fact, often indistinguishable from it at a glance. Being quickly informed and being informed accurately aren’t the same thing, even though social media tends to blur that line.
The people best positioned to reach a real conclusion about Lindsay Clancy were sitting in that jury box, and even they, after weeks of testimony and days of deliberation, couldn’t agree. Everyone else formed an opinion from a fraction of the evidence, mistaking a narrow view for the whole picture.
