Strangers Online Rarely Have Your Best Interests at Heart

If you’re soliciting advice online, there’s a good chance some responses will be from people who actively want you to suffer.

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Earlier this year, influencer Abby Howard posted a video on Instagram indicating that she and her husband left their two boys, ages 1 and 2, alone in their room during a cruise while they went to dinner. The children had already been put to bed for the night, and the couple was only a few feet away during dinner. Adding to the children’s perfect safety, the parents monitored the bedroom through a live feed via FaceTime.

Despite these sensible precautions, the sky promptly fell down on the Howards. Social media commenters rushed to label them “neglectful,” “irresponsible,” and “insane.” One described their decision as “so so so so so so stupid.” For many of these critics, nothing short of 24/7 supervision could possibly qualify for good parenting.

The Howards’ experience is not unique, nor is the issue confined to overprotective parenting. Social media is full of bad advice. For example, millionaire Scott Adams recently expressed on X that “no relationship can work in the modern era because women are perpetually looking to trade up.” Meanwhile, the darker corners of the manosphere are eager to call women whores, constantly (and negatively) comparing any man she goes on a date with to every man she’s ever slept with. Some too-online parents are eager to tell the rest of us (two of the three of us are parents) how giving our kids a little independence is going to get them killed. Reddit’s r/relationship_advice is full of people who tell us to dump our spouses at the drop of a hat. And if we ask some corners of the Internet to diagnose our partners, strangers will be only too eager to oblige. Who knew so many of us were married to narcissistic abusers?

As our civic life has become more atomistic and alienated, we find ourselves with fewer genuine relationships we can lean on for advice. In 2021, 49 percent of Americans reported having three or fewer close friends. But the human urge to seek advice lives on. After all, we are not meant for isolation; we are meant for community. Consequently, many of us have turned to social media to seek the advice that we once sought in person. This shift has been, with some exceptions, a disaster.

Why? We suggest three reasons.