commenting on social trends responsibly

19 Sep, 2026

Commenting on social trends is unfortunately a job and it isn’t an empirical one. The job of social commentary used to be limited to opinion columnists, then the bloggers joined them, and after that the social media users and YouTubers followed. What do they all have in common? They generally lack the expertise to have the nuance to speak on most of the topics they crown themselves experts in.¹ While it is of course that not everyone falls under this umbrella of incompetent commentators, it is a large enough group to warrant criticism. This competence deficiency needs to change!

Personally, I don’t pay much attention to opinion columnists unless an opinion essay covering a political event on the national or global stage written by someone with the credentials to discuss such a topic in a reputable outlet catches my eye which isn’t that often these days. I began digging into opinion columnists, their stylistic choices, and lack of evidence in identifying trends after watching Sex and the City, a show narrated by The New York Star columnist Carrie Bradshaw covering dating life in NYC who is based on real-life columnist Candace Bushnell working for The New York Observer writing a column of the same name. In the show, she would draw conclusions that apply to society at large from very personal anecdotes and posit them as universal facts of life. Thanks to her, my eyes were opened to the opinion columnists being the predecessors of the cottage industry of ahistorical sensationalization online.

My problem with social commentary is that the people doing it usually either lack a fundamental understanding of the phenomena they’re covering, what preceded them, and why the phenomena even exist, or they intentionally omit what they know and would provide nuance to push their own policies and warped worldviews. They come at social change from an amateurish point of view and want to convince the reader or viewer that what they’re about to see is something exciting, whether in a good or a bad way. They phrase their “analysis” as if the phenomenon is a never-before-seen event that is allegedly about to upend our lives. Author Rayne Fisher-Quann named it “the perpetual present-tense” which is marked by the adverbs “increasingly” or the use of gerunds to signify an ongoing event. You can find this language in opinion columns, social media posts of pundits or pop culture commentators, or YouTubers LARPing as documentarians.

Doing social commentary properly would require a lot of resources to back up claims about the general population with representative data that is interpreted by a person that understands the now and the before. Naturally, a YouTuber doing this to stir up engagement for a living, because they’ve been sold the lie that being independent and self-employed is freedom, is going to lack the resources in terms of money, ability, and time to perform this empirical research. Consequently, they tend to base their claims on conversations on social media that they have personally come across. How representative that data is, given that they typically rely on social media sites with personalized algorithmic feeds, doesn’t matter for whether they will discuss the topic or not. What’s worse is that with the rise of bot networks manipulating public opinion, it is prohibitive to use what one perceives on these platforms as confirmation of a real phenomenon with methodical research.

What would be a good compromise is covering a personal niche of which the commentator is a part of and that exists outside of the internet. If it is an online-only phenomenon, it is important to be very nuanced and reserved in judging the prevalence of what one is seeing outside of traditional forums or blogs from chronological feeds. But the reality is that these amateurs LARPing as journalists simply lack the knowhow of approaching such things methodically and responsibly in addition to the knowledge about and understanding of the communities and trends they’re covering or the society/context in which they exist, so the result is the social commentary scene we know today that distorts reality for clicks and engagement, keeping us in perpetual, paralyzing fear of all that surrounds us.

Unfortunately, with the way our economies are structured and the incentives they present to do anything, I cannot see how any of my criticisms could be ameliorated and my suggestions realized. We cannot have a healthy and vibrant information ecosystem in an economy that prioritizes profit over fulfilling our informational needs. Moreover, it is unrealistic to expect those hustling to survive to behave responsibly when we don’t hold the most powerful in our societies to the same standards. Therefore, the first step in the right direction would be coalescing around forming an economy that puts life before numbers and graphs in order to better serve those informing us and ourselves so they can deliver us the information we need to make collective, well-informed decisions in a democracy.