Famous Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco once said, “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community, but now they have the same right as a Nobel Prize winner.”

Eco was never one to pull his punches. His critique touches on a fundamental reality of the digital age: the collapse of the "gatekeeper" system. While his phrasing is intentionally provocative and arguably elitist, it highlights a structural change in how humans process truth. His words embody the tensions we are now seeing between the distrust he highlighted and the internet’s democratization, which has amplified marginalized voices. With social media platforms, ordinary people who were historically ignored by traditional media now have the power to broadcast their own lived experiences.

Before social media, information passed through filters: editors, peer-review boards, and librarians. Historically, a person with a baseless theory had a limited radius of influence. But today, social media does not prioritize accuracy; it prioritizes engagement. An outrageous claim often travels faster and farther than a boring truth. On a screen, a social media post from a Nobel laureate and a post from a conspiracy theorist look identical. They carry the same weight, use the same font, and have the same layout. However, the words of the latter carry concealed weapons that can harm unsuspecting victims.

Today, after another day spent scrolling feeds choked with AI-generated noise and hyper-partisan outrage, Eco’s grumpy prophecy feels less like elitism and more like a structural diagnosis. We dismantled the old gatekeepers, but we forgot to build anything to replace their essential function: distinguishing relative truth from noise. We are living through the tension, trying to figure out how to balance the beautiful empowerment of free speech with the critical necessity of factual accuracy.

With social media, it is like throwing an incredible global party where everyone can speak with no bouncers and no bartenders to cut people off. The platforms have tried to have it both ways: maximizing engagement, which usually thrives on outrage and sensationalism, while minimally policing truth. The results have been devastatingly mixed.

The trend appears to have shifted away from the necessary top-down "fact-checking" practices toward "collaborative moderation," exemplified by features such as Community Notes on X. In theory, this is the democratization of truth—a “wisdom of the crowds" approach where consensus beats individual bias.

In practice, however, truth is often slower than a lie. While these systems work well for debunking yesterday’s news, they fail spectacularly in real-time crises. When fast-moving political noise gets posted, it can take hours for the "truth" to catch up to a viral falsehood. By then, the damage to public perception is done. Furthermore, these human-powered efforts are currently drowning under the sheer volume of AI-generated "slop"—low-effort, synthetic content designed solely to trigger algorithms to work. Our politicians do not like this at all.

Because platforms proved unable—or unwilling—to effectively govern their own spaces, the government is considering imposing regulations to address the situation. Several bills on fake news and deepfakes are now being deliberated in both chambers of Congress. It appears we will be entering an era of hard enforcement.

In most countries, the legislative landscape is reactive and punitive. We see laws that strictly enforce short takedown time for deepfakes and the criminalization of creating non-consensual synthetic media. While necessary to combat the weaponization of AI, these regulations may introduce new perils. When governments demand speed under threat of massive fines, platforms may possibly over-correct. They can deploy aggressive AI filters that frequently mistake satire, legitimate political dissent, or cultural nuance for misinformation.

This regulatory heat highlights a central tension of our time: We demand platforms protect us from lies, but we fear giving them (or the government) the power to define what "truth" is.

So, where does that leave the user? We are realizing that perhaps humans were not meant to be in a room with four billion other people shouting simultaneously. Eco's lament was ultimately about a loss of shared reality. The democratization of voice means the democratization of responsibility. In the pre-Internet era, we outsourced truth verification to institutions. Today, that duty falls squarely on us.

Digital literacy is no longer merely a "nice-to-have" skill; it is a fundamental civic duty. It requires a constant, low-level skepticism of everything we see on a screen. It means understanding that if something makes you emotionally triggered, it is probably designed to bypass your critical thinking faculties.

We cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Social media has provided us with a megaphone, and the Nobel laureate is often drowned out. The challenge now is not to silence anyone, but to build better personal and collective noise-canceling headphones, so that when the truth does whisper, we still have the capacity to hear it.

(The author is an executive member of the National Innovation Council, lead convener of the Alliance for Technology Innovators for the Nation (ATIN), vice president of the Analytics and AI Association of the Philippines, and vice president of UP System Information Technology Foundation. Email: [email protected])