For some reason I have yet to understand, the website Britannica, published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., has decided to weigh in on timely topics with in-depth “ProCon” articles that supposedly fairly explain both sides of an issue.

The ProCon articles are supposedly human-crafted, although they read and feel like machine-generated products. For example, the paragraph length and sentence length vary naturally in almost all genuine scientific research reports. Not so with Britannica ProCon articles, which have a rhythm of sentence length, paragraph length, and citations so monotonous as to make any revelation seem unspectacular.

The Britannica ProCon article that first caught my attention is on the question, “Is Social Media Good for Society?” The article begins by citing SixDegrees.com, founded in 1997,  as the first social media site. Perhaps it was the first site in Britannica, but in the rest of the world, it is hard to beat The WELL’s claim to being “among the first” social media sites when it began operations in 1985.

The WELL, a series of topical discussion boards similar to Reddit, was already 12 years old when SixDegrees was born. A history of The WELL appeared in WIRED magazine in 1997 — the same year SixDegrees was founded. Even then, text-only social media led to emotional trauma and even suicide. The perils of social media were well-known before Britannica’s history even began.

There are 352 sources listed at the conclusion of the Pro/Con piece. However, only a fraction of those articles are actually referenced in the piece. Of the sources between one and 100, only 31 of them are referenced. For sources between 200 and 299, only 11 are footnoted in the piece. The “Sources” section is pure machine work, an unfiltered list of hundreds of articles resulting from a search for “Is Social Media Good for Society?” I’m not willing to see how many are hallucinations.

In the section entitled “Social Media and Politics,” they start with this whopper: 

On Nov. 3, 2008, the day before the US presidential election, Democratic candidate Barack Obama had 2,379,102 Facebook supporters, 38 percent more than Republican candidate John McCain who had 620,359 supporters.

Since Obama had almost four times as many Facebook followers as McCain, I’m guessing they meant to write 380%. How many teachers are going to see the grossly incorrect 38% number repeated in term papers on social media?

The section on social media and politics shockingly contains no mention of Cambridge Analytica and their illegal harvesting of millions of Facebook profiles that were then used to target political advertising. However, it does include the following statement, sure to draw the ire of U.S. President Donald Trump:

Russian trolls, bots, and content polluters influenced the 2016 US presidential election and used Twitter to stoke both sides of the debate over vaccines to promote “political discord.”

Moving along to how social media impacts mental health, Britannica informs us that “contrary to popular perception,” only 57% of online sexual predators are adults. Are we supposed to be comforted by that fact? Alarmed by it? They acknowledge in this backhanded way that smartphones connect minors with sexual predators, young and old.

In a confused paragraph, Britannica reports huge numbers of users of social media reporting declines in mental health “during COVID-19.” According to their survey, the following were reported declines in their mental health:

• 57.6% of people who got their news from Reddit
• 43.0% of people who got their news from Twitter
• 41.6% of people who got their news from Facebook

I did fact-check this source because the numbers are surprising. Also, the date of the article is surprising: it was supposedly published on April 20, 2020. Since the U.S. travel ban only came into effect on March 13, 2020, the survey must have been done before the mental health impacts of lockdowns became widespread.

Of course, the real source doesn’t appear to exist. The only reference Google can find to the “COVID-19 Media Diet” by the Flixed Team is the Britannica footnote itself. There is no way to verify these numbers, which seem remarkably high.

At this point, I would caution that one of the dangers of using social media is running into sources like this, which pretend to deeply approach a subject but instead string together unverifiable claims that could cause serious misperceptions. For example, “cyberbullied victims were more than twice as likely to ‘self-harm and enact suicidal behavior’ than non-victims.” I do not for a moment believe that is based on a verifiable study.

As I said at the beginning, I really don’t understand what Britannica gets out of this. If it were community-sourced, like Wikipedia, you could at least challenge and debate the claims made. No individual would want their name associated with this project, and no individual is. The author is described as “The Editors of ProCon,” who “verify new content and update existing content.”

If Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. is going to create an entire library of this stuff, Please Stop! It’s not going to help your company or your customers to be associated with this kind of journalism. There are chances you could do real harm with some of the information you’re putting out. If you want real journalism on smartphone addiction, social media addiction, and internet addiction, you’ll find it here at AddictionNews.

Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published November 11, 2025.

Sources:

“Is Social Media Good for Society?,” Britannica, November 3, 2025.

“The Saga of The Well, the World’s Most Influential Online Community,” WIRED, May 1, 1997.

“Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: ‘We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles’ — video,” The Guardian, March 17, 2018.

Image Copyright: lacheev.