To build a personal brand and a loyal audience, a person often

To build a personal brand and a loyal audience, a person often needs to take a side on an issue. This means they need to boldly declare their views as correct. And that the other side is wrong.

The challenge with this approach, is any well-reasoned person knows there are always two sides to the story. That the middle ground is often the most accurate.

Unfortunately, their audience doesn’t want a well-reasoned approach. The audience wants to hear their views reaffirmed back to them. In other words, people want confirmation of their beliefs.

We see this with personal brands like Rachel Maddow and Ben Shapiro. Their views are extreme and don’t factor in the many nuances of a subject.

This issue is further compounded by social media algorithms. We are all byproducts of filter bubbles and are mostly shown similar content to anything we’ve “liked” in the past.

Because the days of everyone huddling around the TV to watch one of three channels are (thankfully) gone. This Cambrian Explosion of content has opened the eyes of many to the previously unseen issues in the world. We now have agency over what we consume.

But most consumers don’t realize these content creators are simply pandering to their loyal audience and are not going to provide a reasoned analysis of the subject.

And so, how do we overcome this phenomenon?

I’m not sure. Though here’s what I do when I hear something that seems extreme: I consider the source, I Google the topic, and I try to find contrarian views.

I know it’s a lot easier to just trust the headline. Unfortunately, we live in a world where we also need to verify.

tl;dr Do your own research. Trust, but verify.