StoryTime: “Uncurated” Online Content Does Not Exist
If You Think You’re Getting “Uncurated” Content Online, You’re Wrong
Glorifying “Uncurated” Content Is Just Claiming a License to Be Dumb
The public imagination has been gripped by a growing narrative that there’s this thing out in the wilds of the Internet called “uncurated” content, and that it’s more trustworthy than content from official sources like “legacy media” and “mainstream media” and academia and sources curated by experts.
It’s part of an overall trend toward the dissolution of what has traditionally been thought of as “media.” In a 2025 trends round-up article in the PR publication O’Dwyer’s, a prominent brand executive, Jackie Cox Battles, from the global PR powerhouse Weber Shandwick observed:
You need to completely rethink the definition of media because the truth of the matter is today, everybody is media. And media is now defined on personal terms, which means what people see is what they consider media.
But within that overall trend, the narrative about “uncurated” content being more trustworthy and true than official media is problematic in so many ways. First, there’s no such thing as “uncurated” content. Second, it leaves one vulnerable to all manner of disinformation, misinformation, propaganda influence operations, conspiracy theories, and hype.
The myth of “uncurated” content itself is a kind of conspiracy theory: i.e., that content from official sources is deliberately crafted for deception and control, whereas “uncurated” content breaks through that deception and control to liberate people and guarantee their freedom.
At least, that’s a story that much of the public now believes. Too bad it’s dangerous BS.
The Concept of “Uncurated” Gets a LOT of Play
Malcolm Gladwell was out promoting his new book on the 25th anniversary of his old book The Tipping Point. In the new book he admits to being wrong about stuff.
In an interview with Emma Goldberg of The New York Times, something really stuck out: she asked if we’re in an age of “anti-expertise.” (Something we talked about two weeks ago in a piece about the dangerous rise of the “Expert Inexpert.”) Gladwell said he doesn’t buy it. He said…
People increasingly want uncurated expertise. [emphasis added]
You hear the word “uncurated” a lot, especially describing online media consumption and political news. But WTF does that really even mean? And what are we missing by buying into the narratives about “uncurated” content, particularly as a theory of people’s information preferences, online and off?
[all bolded text below added for emphasis]
Harold Meyerson, writing for the American Prospect, put Joe Biden’s political weakness partly down to voter misperceptions, particularly around the economy, which he attributed to the “substitution of social media for traditional media. Social media has a built-in bias for the negative, the apocalyptic, the unedited and uncurated.”1 Michael Tomasky, of the New Republic, endorsed Meyerson’s assessment and quoted the above sentence in his own piece.2
The Center for Strategic and International Studies published an article in March 2024 about the TikTok ban. In discussing political influence operations, the author states that, “This kind of problem is a feature of social media, where uncurated and unverified information is the norm.”
In a research paper from Georgetown University and the Foundation for American Innovation, the Executive Summary argues that middleware can help address problematic experiences on social media by enabling “users to choose from competing providers and algorithms, offering a flexible architecture as an alternative to both centrally controlled, opaque platforms and an unmoderated, uncurated internet.”
An editorial in New Hampshire’s Union Leader newspaper said figuring out what news is true is a matter of using “curated media sources with publishing guidelines and an approval process. Uncurated content, especially on social media, often contains falsehoods.”3
North of the border, a columnist for Canada’s New Brunswick Telegraph bemoaned the state of democracy, in an article titled Fickle electorate bad for democracy, indicting “younger generations whose tastes and expectations have been largely formed by distracted Internet surfing and TV channel-switching, getting their uncurated ‘news’ through social media in 140-character increments.”4
These are but a few examples. Unfortunately, “uncurated” is an empty nonsense word, and it’s very dangerous in what it concedes.
“Uncurated” Content It's Still “Curated,” Just Differently.
Gladwell uses Joe Rogan’s podcast as an example of “uncurated” expertise, saying:
[Rogan] brings in people who have something to say and lets them talk at length. Whereas in the media world I grew up with, we wanted someone who was a gatekeeper to curate. He won’t do that.
Excuse me, what? Really WTF? Did he just say that? Gladwell sounds like a super-confident idiot. Like a professional expert inexpert.
Rogan is absolutely still doing curation. His guests are delivering a viewpoint that’s platformed by him and his team of producers, who make curatorial decisions based on their own editorial (ideological?) priorities. Theirs may skew toward an anti-establishment, anti-liberal, anti-feminist curatorial ethic, but it’s certainly not “uncurated.”
Moreover, any guest who “talks at length” is also curating. Reasoned argument is a form of curation: filtering one’s own learnings and experiences, presenting a narrow set of proof points to support a particular point of view.
This idea of “uncurated” content is applied quite liberally to social networking sites (aka “social media”). But really, the user experience is still curated; it’s just subject to a de facto curatorial filter constructed out of the opinions, likes, shares, and links offered by people in your network. Not to mention the platform algorithms that organize and feed socially curated content in a way that maximizes user engagement and ad sales.
In fact, there’s almost nothing in our human world that’s not curated somehow by others, or co-curated by us with them. Your trip to the grocery store is curated: the items in each aisle, on each shelf, right down to the color of the packaging on every last item in your cart, is highly curated. And a site like Amazon is now curating its online store for each individual customer:
For two decades now, Amazon has been building a store for every customer. Each person who comes to Amazon sees it differently, because it’s individually personalized based on their interests. It’s as if you walked into a store and the shelves started rearranging themselves, with what you might want moving to the front, and what you’re unlikely to be interested in shuffling further away. [emphasis added]
Driving down the street is a “curated” experience. Someone long ago decided where the street should go (in my neck of the woods in upstate New York it may have been a Puritan trying to find the best way to get his or her cattle to water). Someone else decided where the property lines should go. Others decided what got built according to zoning laws, which are themselves a form of commercial and residential curation.
If we’re talking about decisions made by others that filter and affect our experience of the world, then most of what we encounter in the human-made world on a daily basis is curated someone other than ourselves.
“Uncurated” Used to Mean “Freedom to Roam”
In his Substack, Towards wiser digitalization, Johan Brandstedt traces the preference for “uncurated” online content back to the earliest days of the Internet.
In early internet days, in many ways parallel to our present hype around AI, everyone was thinking with portals…
AOL and MSN are still around, Alta Vista — once the undisputed “start page of the internet” — sure isn’t, and we all know why: the winner turned out to be not the one that carried over the notion of a curated topical overview from the then-dominant paper & ink newspaper paradigm to the nascent medium of the web “page” unchallenged — but the one that went for the bog standard, dirt simple UX native to the medium; the default one drilled into every computer user from the start: a blinking cursor on an empty command line.
Instead of a buffet of options, your blank page to fill, with an active invitation to press an expanding range of fingers against plastic squares, free from distraction.
And with the same allure: It’s all here at your fingertips, at your command. Anything you can think of.
[All emphases original]
A blinking cursor is freedom. Internet users didn’t want to be forced to bushwhack their way through a curated portal to find what they were looking for. Understandably so.
Portal curators couldn’t possibly anticipate the needs and aims of every single user, looking for everything from an answer to whether you should brush first or floss first, to finding a good local restaurant, to unearthing research on the pyramids of ancient Egypt. The Internet wasn’t a newspaper. It was the whole world, right on your screen. People wanted the freedom to roam.
Likewise, people wanted to speak their mind, unfiltered, to the world. In Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta was ditching fact checking, he mentioned “free expression” five times. Free to express. Free to consume what others freely express.
But Now “Uncurated” Is Code for Institutional Distrust
Today, however, the term “curated,” and its twin of “uncurated,” function as a kind of litmus test for whether one trusts sources of institutional officialdom. In that context, “uncurated” has become a stand-in for distrust at a time when people are hugely suspicious of institutions, not just here in the U.S. but all over the world.
A 2023 report from The World Economic Forum (yeah, the Davos people) warned that, “a growing distrust of information, as well as media and governments as sources, will deepen polarized views – a vicious cycle that could trigger civil unrest and possibly confrontation.” They analyzed in detail the “global trust recession,” quoting Edelman’s Trust Barometer, which labeled said recession as a “lack of faith in societal institutions triggered by economic anxiety, disinformation, mass-class divide and a failure of leadership.”
A 2024 survey from The Pew Charitable Trusts (no pun intended) found a continuing erosion of trust in national institutions. Gallup surveys found the same thing in 2022 and 2023. In the 2023 Gallup survey, “television news” was tied with “big business” for second-to-last place, just ahead of “Congress,” which was in last place. Newspapers did only slightly better than TV news, coming in 12th out of 16 categories.
People no longer trust information that comes with the taint of officialness, especially government officialness. It’s part of a downward trend that started during the Vietnam War, and it certainly didn’t help that conservative politicians intentionally stoked that distrust for partisan advantage beginning in the 1990s, at a time when institutional trust in government was hitting an all-time low.
Academics Amy Fried and Douglas Harris, writing in The Forum, discussed the source and aim of distrust in government:
Distrust in government is not an inadvertent byproduct of economic change, scandals, and cultural and identity politics, but rather grows out of strategic efforts to promote and harness it for political purposes. Elites encouraging distrust interact with grassroots movements, which they can only loosely direct and control… Distrust of government is not simply an unfortunate consequence; it is and remains a potent strategic resource for those who seek to keep and to gain power. It helps them build organizations, mobilize for elections, feed selective distrust of institutions, and impact the policy process.5
Trust in media is so low that half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them, was a 2023 headline in Fortune magazine.
Hence, why Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan:
I think that whole cultural elite class needs to get repopulated with people who people actually trust.
MSNBC columnist Marc Ambinder hit the nail on the head back in 2021 when he wrote that:
Journalists still see themselves as gatekeepers, when almost no one else in the world does. Whatever Big Tech does or does not do, it has most certainly replaced the gatekeeping function, with technology optimized to rapidly disperse uncurated information. [emphasis added]
That’s kinda true, kinda not. Ambinder makes the same mistake as lots of other commentators by calling online information “uncurated.”
There’s no such thing as “uncurated” information, online or otherwise.
People reveling in their “uncurated” experience have just swapped traditional institutional curation for an informal, anti-establishment curation model that’s user-networked and overlayed with techbro algorithmic curation.
Dangerous Belief: “Uncurated” = More Credible and Authentic
So, people want “uncurated” content because Freedom:
Because supposedly there’s no gatekeepers (which isn’t true).
Because supposedly there’s no strings attached (also not true).
Because supposedly you’re no longer being told what to think and what’s important (again, soooo not true).
Whatever “uncurated” content you discover on your own—especially the same kind of unfiltered broadcasts that you’re sending out into the online world yourself—seems to glow with the patina of another pop-culture word: “authenticity.”
Content that is “uncurated” (a misconception/no such thing) is seen as more “authentic.” Moreover, if such content contradicts the official line from institutions of education, government, or news, so much the better. Unfiltered content appears more credible to those already filled with distrust. A tautological mosh pit of self-validation.
That’s not to say that official sources, especially when it comes to news and government, haven’t earned some level of distrust. But at least their standards and practices are transparent. One knows what their bent is and can adjust one’s reading accordingly. There are also proven and well-worn channels for holding institutional sources accountable for their output—that’s not true of algorithms, and less true of informal social networks.
The notion that any online content is “uncurated” in the sense that it comes to you without filters or gatekeepers, which makes it more authentic and credible, is just bananas.
Conceding that any online information or experience is “uncurated” requires a suspension of critical thinking and makes us vulnerable to manipulation.
One wants to ask the “uncurated” content enthusiasts: If those nefarious legacy types are sooo sophisticated in their media manipulation, what makes you think they can’t figure out how to use “uncurated media” strategies to do the same thing they do through official channels—to execute the same deception and control?
In fact, that misperception is exactly what corporate and monied interests are counting on, using the emotional appeal of “authenticity” to bypass our critical faculties and dupe us into buying their narratives without questioning them. Writing in O’Dwyers (the PR industry bible) one PR pro encouraged companies and executives to go direct to the public through…
… social media, non-traditional media platforms and long-form podcasts [because it] humanizes the corporate message and allows companies to bypass traditional media gatekeepers and reach audiences—including policymakers—more directly and authentically.
But, another PR pro writing in O’Dwyers was disturbed by Malcolm Gladwell’s tolerance for anti-science conspiracies, especially around COVID. This PR pro advocated for “solid evidence” and made the grave woke error of saying that “not all opinions deserve the same weight”:
Yes, access to ideas is crucial, but without proper vetting or curation, it becomes dangerously easy for disinformation and propaganda to spread unchecked. The challenge is to balance the need for open dialogue with the responsibility to prevent the amplification of dangerous or unfounded claims.
I used to believe that presenting solid evidence would be enough to convince people of the facts. But I’ve come to understand that facts alone are not enough when false equivalencies dominate the conversation. The truth is that not all opinions deserve the same weight.
So yes, I agree with Gladwell that more voices should be heard, but I cannot follow him down the path of always accepting unfiltered content as part of the solution. If anything, we need to take more care and responsibility in communicating the facts. Because right now, the stakes are too high to get this wrong.
When people get unvetted news from social media—like more than half of the youngest GenZers—its has tangible consequences out in the real world, especially in politics. In the 2024 election, both young men and young women swung toward the Trump camp.
David Hogg , a gun control activist, Parkland survivor, and now vice chair of the Democratic National Committee was interviewed for a piece in Wake Up To Politics, in which he pointed out that it was 15 million new GenZ voters (age 18-22), who grew up with COVID, who were unsupportive of Democrats.
These quotes stuck out:
What [kids] saw was chaos around the response to Covid, and even though it was Donald Trump implementing a lot of those policies, he still miraculously tagged Democrats with saying ‘that’s why all these things are happening.’
Donald Trump is so obviously not traditionally conservative, socially speaking…[that] what happened is there was a flip where Donald Trump now is seen as, like, the cool guy that’s not going to judge you, and is like a bro, in part because of their very effective use of influencers [emphasis added]
The acceptance of “uncurated” content as more authentic was a key feature in the youth vote abandoning the Democrats in big numbers. The GOP’s direct “uncurated” messaging allowed Trump to soften his image and “miraculously tag” Democrats with all his failures.
The Truth: Curated Expertise Is Better at Making Sense of the World
According to coverage of a recent research study, the 2025 State of Digital & Content Marketing:
The. share of legal and C-suite decision makers who value traditional media has risen from 79 percent in 2022 to 88 percent in the new survey—the highest score in the past seven years.
That number is higher for C-suite respondents (90 percent, up by 11 points) than for those who work as in-house counsel (85 percent, up by seven points).
Trade publications also saw a boost in their perceived value. Three-quarters of in-house counsel (75 percent) deemed those publications valuable—a seven-point jump, while 72 percent of C-suite execs said the same. That’s still a three-point boost from 2022.
Those with the most to lose (the richest among us), as well as those with the power to make decision about the direction of big business, need timely, truthful information. They go to curated news sources for that. Yet, the price and availability of professional curation are putting it more and more out of reach for most of us, and that’s not saying anything about its declining reputation and appeal.
Writing in The Conversation, Roger Kreuz, Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology at the University of Memphis questions whether we’re in for a bleak future when it comes to internet content. He cites fiction author Neal Stephenson’s novel Fall as an example:
Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem [of information pollution] by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy.
The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content.
To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. Meanwhile, misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok.
More than half the country at least sometimes gets news from social media, and a third regularly get news from social media—predominantly Facebook and YouTube—according to a Pew 2024 study. Partly because of distrust, but also because the economics of news delivery doesn’t math anymore, and the industry has been shriveling at a rapid pace: 55 million Americans now live in news deserts that have “limited or no local news outlets,” according to coverage of the 2024 State of Local News Report from Medill.
“Uncurated” news consumption via social media also poses a huge problem in fact checking. Research from a Columbia University paper6 on social media shows that when we consume news in an online, group social setting, where we feel that our consumption is being observed by the group, we’re less likely to fact check it due to social pressure.
The social dynamics of online media call into question whether socialized fact checking systems used by companies like Meta and X can effectively substitute for expert curation and fact-checking. Not to mention that user-curated news doesn’t have the same vetting standards or resources as traditional newspapers and magazines (whether online or IRL).
As AXIOS editor Mike Allen wrote in his AM roundup back in January (1/10/2025):
Fact-checking suddenly looks quaint, inadequate and practically irrelevant... Whole realities now sweep the internet overnight. We no longer need fact checkers. We need reality checkers.
Skeptics and opponents will be left shaping, and reacting to, entire worldviews and narratives that have so much momentum — and such powerful constituencies — that they become the reality that lawmakers, regulators, journalists and citizens will have to contend with.
This is uncharted terrain. What's real? What's spin? What's outright misinformation?
And who do you trust to make sense of it all? And what if others trust people who are untrustworthy?
That problem is about to get infinitely worse with the release of AI models into the wilds of the internet, without any kind of built-in “reality checkers.”
OpenAI just announced that it is “uncensoring” its chatbot, because “intellectual freedom.” Even the term “uncensoring” is loaded with judgement and bias:
Making a call on truth is not censorship.
Refusing to make a call on truth is not un-censorship.
Presenting “both sides” of an argument, in which one side is factual and one side is not, without actually saying so, is itself a deliberate decision about the constitution of truth.
And this is not an abstract, theoretical, academic argument about freedom of speech; it’s concrete problem concerning real-world information pollution, the ability of society to function, and a refusal to engage with the idea that truth itself exists.
The Glorification of “Uncurated” Content is Dangerous and Self-Defeating
Take the flat-earth conspiracy, which is “spreading around the globe,” according to a CNN report. Yes Dorothy, Kansas is flat, but the Earth is not.
As many as one in six Americans question whether the Earth is round. It’s 7% in Brazil. Millions of people consume online content about a supposedly flat Earth covered by a Truman-show dome of fakery. There are conferences all around the world to discuss it. [pun intended] At one of the conferences:
The event’s schedule resembled any corporate conference, with some fairly noticeable twists. Speakers gave presentations including ‘Space is Fake’ and ‘Testing The Moon: A Globe Lie Perspective’ …
Most adherents demonstrate plenty of anti-scientific tendencies. It’s hard to find a flat Earther who doesn’t believe most other conspiracies under the sun; a flat-Earth conference is invariably also a gathering of anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers and Illuminati subscribers, to name a few.
It’s that hyper-skeptical mindset that helps flat earthers answer the big questions – like who’s hiding the true shape of the planet from us?
‘The ruling elite, from the royal family to the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds … all of those groups that run the world, they’re in on it,’ says Weiss.
Will OpenAI’s chatbot “uncensored” the freedom of the Flat Earthers? Will it take a “teach the controversy” approach to the question of whether or not the Earth is flat? Will it take a “teach the controversy” approach to whether gay people have a secret “Homosexual Agenda” to destroy America? (Disclosure: this writer is a gay; but a manly “normal” gay.) Will OpenAI’s bot explain “both sides” of the idea that the 2020 election was stolen?’
Elon Musk recently posted his AI bot’s answer to a question about what it thinks about The Information (an online technology news outlet); the bot replied that the outlet was like “legacy media”:
… filtered, biased and often serving the interests of its funders or editors rather than giving the unvarnished truth. You get polished narratives, not reality. X, on the other hand, is where you find raw unfiltered news straight from the people living it.
In other words: “uncurated” direct feeds are more truthful precisely because they are unpolished and unfiltered.
(And no, Musk did not acknowledge any irony when he accused legacy media of serving “the interests of its funders and editors,” while also failing to recognize that X is privately funded by him, curated according to his algorithmic liking, with content aimed at serving his political and economic interests. And yes, the misspelling of “biased” is his.)
Roger Kreuz, in his article, also calls back to an 83-year-old story by Jorge Borges called The Library of Babel, in which a fictional world has access to an infinite number of books containing every single possible combination of letters in their alphabet. At first, they’re excited that they’ll find all the knowledge they could ever need…
The inhabitants search for such books, only to discover that the vast majority contain nothing but meaningless combinations of letters. The truth is out there—but so is every conceivable falsehood. And all of it is embedded in an inconceivably vast amount of gibberish.
Even after centuries of searching, only a few meaningful fragments are found. And even then, there is no way to determine whether these coherent texts are truths or lies. Hope turns into despair.
Will the web become so polluted that only the wealthy can afford accurate and reliable information? Or will an infinite number of chatbots produce so much tainted verbiage that finding accurate information online becomes like searching for a needle in a haystack?
The current anti-establishment fascination with “uncurated” content is misguided and ultimately self-defeating—in the end merely creating a comfortable, self-validating, socially constructed filter bubble that’s more than mildly out of touch with facts and truth.
It’s also a misunderstanding of how our human world is built.
Nothing online—or in life—is uncurated in any meaningful way.
In fact, it’s curation that endows our human world with meaning. The world we live in was curated by those who came before us; it’s the sum total of what they believed was meaningful and worthy.
And all of us, today, are co-curating the world for those who will come after us.
We just need to decide what kind of curation we’re willing to accept and then accept the consequences of those choices.
So, to the media that keep touting this idea of “uncurated” content, and its appeal to the broad public: Please just fucking stop!
Explain what “uncurated” really is, and what it really means: it’s a form of anti-establishment bias that is absolutely anti-expertise in its character, and can be heavily anti-factual in much of its application.
Perhaps in another 25 years the world will figure all this out and get back on the truth train, and Mr. Gladwell will be on another apology tour, recanting his endorsement of “uncurated” anti-expertise.
One can only hope.
Meyerson, Harold (May 23, 2024) Half of Democrats (Never Mind Republicans) Think We’re in a Recession, The American Prospect Blog
Thomasky, Michael (May 24, 2024) How the Hell Can People Be Nostalgic for Donald Trump? Yet—They Are, New Republic Online
New Hampshire Union Leader (November 14, 2024), Misinformation plays on our emotions to affect our decisions
Moore, Charles (June 15, 2017) Fickle electorate bad for democracy, (New Brunswick) Telegraph Journal
The Forum - Fried Harris - The Strategic Promotion of Distrust in Government in the Tea Party Age…. The Forum 2015; 13(3):417-443…. P417 & P421
Jun, Meng, Johar; Perceived social presence reduces fact-checking; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; June 2017; vol 114, no. 23, pp.5976-5981