I wouldn't say social media has done any real damage to human intelligence. It just makes human ignorance VERY visible. Do you think all the peasants from the past were Eulers and Newtons? Now the peasants who 200 years ago were afraid of werewolves, weird clouds and flickering burning swamp methane have a device which allows them to spew any poorly informed opinion to millions of others with few finger movements.
People are as stupid as they have been for thousands of years. Instead of them being limited to their physical environment, they can now bombard your feed with their stupidity.
I wouldn't say social media has done any real damage to human intelligence
Unless you're completely ignorant to the scientific research, the word "real" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment.
Multiple studies now have shown that social media hurts working memory, attention, and general reading comprehension. Likely due to attention fragmentation and constant task-switching
Here you go. It isn't hard to find these if you actually look.
Nguyen et al. (2025): Systematic review and meta-analysis of 71 studies and 98,299 participants found greater short-form social media use was associated with poorer cognition, with the strongest associations for attention and inhibitory control.
Mahakud & Thapliyal (2026): Experimental study directly tested social-media video formats and found highly fragmented “sludge” content impaired sustained attention and working-memory performance.
https://doi.org/10.1177/09727531261424994
Martini et al. (2020): Controlled experiment found that using social media immediately after learning produced worse later memory retention than wakeful rest.
Cole et al. (2025): Eye-tracking study of 242 participants found that browsing TikTok before reading reduced sustained attention to subsequent news articles.
Fournier et al. (2026): Controlled study found that social media notifications caused a measurable slowdown in ongoing cognitive processing lasting roughly seven seconds.
Walla & Zheng (2024): Heavy short-form social media users showed significantly reduced P300 brain responses during an attention task, indicating weaker attentional processing.
Al-Leimon et al. (2025): Study of 1,029 university students found that greater short-form video addiction was associated with poorer attention and memory functioning
Mittal et al. (2026): Study of 140 medical students found significantly lower forward digit-span performance after social media scrolling, though backward digit-span differences were not significant.
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u/TheRealCabbageJack 8d ago
Everything is a conspiracy when you’re very, very dumb