Syed Bukhari, Head of Strategic Communications and Visibility, American University of Sharjah.Earlier this month, researchers at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub published a study that should stop every communications professional in their tracks. A network of fake social media accounts, later identified as a coordinated foreign operation, had spent months seeding divisive content across UK social media channels, masquerading as Scottish independence supporters, Irish nationalists and Latina women.
At its peak, this network generated more engagement about Scottish independence on X than Scotland’s own Scottish National Party. This is not a distant phenomenon. The Government of Dubai’s Media Office has been actively calling out coordinated waves of false social media posts about daily life in the UAE, mostly from foreign accounts.
As someone with a background in diplomacy, I’m not surprised by such foreign influence operations. Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal back in 2016 – in which a now-defunct British political consultancy quietly siphoned data from some 87 million Facebook profiles to micro-target voters with tailored political messaging – we have known just how quickly and efficiently personal data can be used for political ends.
What is surprising is how seemingly straightforward and inexpensive it is to influence a generation’s worldview in today’s news environment. An 18-year-old scrolling through their feed in Sharjah, Edinburgh or Lagos today has few ways of knowing whether the outraged voice in their timeline belongs to a real person or a manufactured persona.
In a global study by Reuters, 44 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds now say social media and video networks are their main news source. In the Gulf, where we are among the most digitally connected societies on earth, those numbers are likely far higher.
The way young people engage with news also varies sharply depending on the platform they use. On TikTok and Instagram Reels, news is consumed almost incidentally, often stripped of historical or political context or turned into memes or humour. Even longerform content, such as YouTube videos or podcasts, is problematic, as it is often produced by a single person or a small team with no obligation to represent more than one side of the story and questionable fact-checking. And yet, this content reaches millions of young people.
The very design of these platforms hijacks young people’s developing brains: pushing increasingly provocative or harmful content, eroding mental health, and, in the worst cases, connecting young users with ill intentioned adults. Given all of this, how can we possibly expect young people to pause and consider where a piece of information came from, why it is being served to them and whether they should trust it? These platforms are engineered to bypass the rational, critical mind before it has even had the chance to fully mature. This is not an accident of design. It is the business model.
In my forthcoming book, The Tyranny of the Average, I argue that algorithmically optimised information environments are not neutral content streams. Rather, they are active mechanisms that sort content in a very particular direction. Content that provokes, outrages or entertains travels furthest and fastest. Content that demands patience, nuance or critical thinking gets buried. Short-form formats compound this by negatively aff ecting attention, memory and focus. And the format itself flattens everything: a graphic clip from a war zone and the latest pair of sneakers arrive in the same size, the same format, with the same swipeable ease. In newsrooms of the past, a fringe claim and a verified report did not sit side by side as though they carried equal authority.
Now they do, and as Clemson’s study showed, the unverified version may even outperform the real one. The Tyranny of the Average argues that readers who seek context and verification are being systematically outperformed by content engineered for speed and reaction. Influence networks do not win because their content is better. They win by exploiting the rules of platforms that were themselves engineered to exploit our attention. Moreover, young people have fewer quality news sources than before. More than 3,000 newspapers have closed in the US since 2005, and media consolidation is accelerating. The gap has been filled by influencers with no editorial oversight and every incentive to confirm their audience’s biases or inflame those who disagree, because in both cases engagement wins, and engagement brings advertising revenue.
It is little wonder that, as the News Literacy Project reports, teens today find news either biased, boring or bad. That same project also found that only 13 per cent of Gen Z respondents fact-check what they read online; four out of five people believe journalists are no more credible than other content creators; and 80 per cent of respondents are inclined to believe conspiracy theories they encounter online.
As the adults in charge, we need to ask: at what cost? Fortunately, governments are beginning to act. Australia has banned social media for under-16s; France requires parental consent for under-15s – and others are following. But regulation alone is not enough. Delaying access only helps if, by the time young people are given it, they also have the tools to navigate it safely.
If we want the tide to keep moving in the right direction, we need to give young people critical-thinking skills before we grant them connectivity. News literacy should be part of every curriculum: tracing a claim to its source, recognising when a statistic has been stripped of context, understanding how algorithms decide what we see next.
We, as communications professionals, also need to ask honestly whether the content we produce serves the end user or simply adds to the noise. Engagement optimisation does not just shape what young people see; it shapes what they learn to accept without question. Every time we produce content built for virality rather than informational value, we erode the conditions that make critical thinking possible.
The information environment we have built is not going to simplify itself. But we can decide, as educators and communicators, whether the content we produce strengthens young people’s capacity to think or quietly undermines it. We often speak about this system as though we are outside it. In reality, we are among the ones feeding it.
By Syed Bukhari, Head of Strategic Communications and Visibility, American University of Sharjah.
