Article by Christopher Mims: “If social media were a literal ecosystem, it would be about as healthy as Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River in the 1960s—when it was so polluted it repeatedly caught fire.
Those conflagrations inspired the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Water Act. But in 2026, nothing comparable exists for our befouled media landscape.
Which means it’s up to us, as individuals, to stop ingesting the pink slime of AI slop, the forever chemicals of outrage bait and the microplastics of misinformation-for-profit. In an age in which information on the internet is so abundant and so low-quality that it’s essentially noise, job number one is to fight our evolutionary instinct to absorb all available information, and instead filter out unreliable sources and bad data.
Fortunately, there’s a way: critical ignoring.
“It’s not total ignoring,” says Sam Wineburg, who coined the term in 2021. “It’s ignoring after you’ve checked out some initial signals. We think of it as constant vigilance over our own vulnerability.”
Critical ignoring was born of research that Wineburg, an emeritus professor of education at Stanford University, and others did on how the skills of professional fact-checkers could be taught to young people in school. Kids and adults alike need the ability to quickly evaluate the truth of a statement and the reliability of its source, they argued. Since then, the term has taken on a life of its own. It’s become an umbrella for a whole set of skills, some of which might seem counterintuitive.
Here’s the quick-and-dirty on how to start practicing critical ignoring in the year ahead…(More)”.
