Not long ago, if you wanted advice on your heart health, you went to a doctor. If you needed to understand your legal rights, you found a lawyer. If you were trying to make sense of a complicated financial decision, you would sit down with someone who had spent years studying how money works. The path to expertise was long, credentialed, and fairly clear.
Then the internet arrived and rewrote the whole thing.
Today, the person giving you nutrition advice might have a following of two million people and no formal training whatsoever. The man explaining the geopolitical situation in Iran and Israel, countries he has never visited by the way, might have more viewers than the evening news. The woman telling you which stocks to buy this week might have started her finance channel eight months ago. And the uncomfortable truth is that many of them are extremely watchable, highly persuasive, and deeply, dangerously wrong.
There are a few reasons this has happened. The first is that the internet removed the gatekeepers. Publishing a book once required a publisher. Getting on television required a network. But anyone with a phone can now reach a global audience. It has given platforms to voices that traditional media ignored. But it has also given platforms to people whose only real qualification is that they figured out how to make engaging content.
The second reason is that real expertise is often boring to watch. A doctor explaining the nuanced relationship between diet and chronic disease will likely spend a lot of time saying it depends, and the research is mixed. A confident influencer will skip all of that and give you a five-step plan that feels actionable and certain. Our brains prefer certainty, especially when we are anxious or overwhelmed. The person who sounds most sure of themselves often wins, regardless of whether they actually know what they are talking about.
We tend to trust people we like and people who share our values. We trust people who speak in plain, uncomplicated language and make us feel smart for understanding them. None of these things has anything to do with whether someone actually knows their subject. But they drive enormous amounts of engagement, and engagement drives reach.
It must be said, though, that this situation presents some grave consequences. People have delayed or avoided medical treatment because a wellness influencer told them to try something else first. People have made genuinely harmful financial decisions based on advice from someone who did not have the requisite expertise. People have formed strong opinions about nuanced political and historical events based on a twenty-minute video that presented one side as though it were the only side.
This does not mean that online content creators are frauds or do not know what they are talking about. Many are thoughtful, careful, and genuinely knowledgeable. Some are even researchers and practitioners who use the internet to communicate real expertise in ways that are accessible to the average Ghanaian. For example, consider a lawyer sharing legal language in Twi on TikTok or YouTube. The problem is that there is no reliable way to tell the difference at first glance, and people need to be able to sift through the noise.
Credit: Manasseh Wintemah Apurum
