What proportion of children in MoldovaAn Eastern European country with a population of 2.5 million. It is a former Soviet republic. do you think are in education? And what percentage of South Koreans believe climate breakdown is a major threat to their country?

Around three-quarters of people get the answers to these questions wrong. Although 90% of Moldovan children are still in school, most people believe it must be more like 40 or 60%.

And although South Koreans are very aware of the dangers of climate breakdown, with 80% agreeing it is a major threat, most of us expect the figure to be only 30 to 55%.

These figures come from a new website, called Gapminder, that is revealing just how little we know about the world. It helps to expose how our ignorance leads us to an unfairly pessimisticTending to believe that the worst will happen. view.

This means we do not recognise how much progress we have made on issues like climate breakdown, and that we underestimate how much better things have got in poorer countries.

What is responsible for this obliviousness? Many point the figure at social media. They say it has flooded our minds with untruths, and taken away the tools we need to understand the world.

Social media, experts warn, tends to amplify the most extreme and controversial positions, because they drive engagements. The more people argue, the more clicks and likes for the platform.

And controversialists are also pessimists. They exaggerate the problems in the world to make their extreme solutions seem more needed. When we spend all our time reading these people's ideas, we come to believe that everything is worse than it really is.

Psychologists warn that social media also stops us from doing "deep reading", a kind of reading in which we are completely focused on the text in front of us. Deep reading is like working your way through a balanced three-course meal.

But social media offers us a blizzard of text, images and videos, hopping rapidly from subject to subject. It is like eating packet after packet of biscuits: a constant sugar rush that keeps us energised, but only for as long as we are still doing it.

Just as eating too much sugar stops us from eating healthier things, the freneticFast, frantic and uncontrolled. pace of social media reduces our attention span and keeps us from doing deep reading. Only 25% of children say they read daily or nearly daily for pleasure.¹

There is still hope, however. Some think the tide is turning. 

Social media companies are in crisis. Facebook, once used by one in seven of all the people on the planet, has struggled to attract younger users. Elon MuskA South African-born entrepreneur whose companies have included the online payment service PayPal. He now controls Twitter, renamed 'X'.'s erratic leadership of Twitter has scared off its biggest advertisers. For the first time, we might be looking at a future without social media.

Some believe there is a deeper reason for this. The storm of lies and exaggerations that rages constantly on social media is simply a turn-off. We get bored of being manipulated all the time.

So 2023 might, they say, be the year that we finally throw off the shackles of Big Tech and start learning about the world again.

Yes: Constant outrage and lying are just plain boring. We are all fed up with the high-sugar diet of short texts and videos: we are ready to start reading healthily again.

No: Like sugar, social media is addictive. It does not matter that we do not really enjoy using it: we keep coming back because it has become a compulsion.

Or... The problem is not just social media: it is our pace of life in general. Modern life is frenetic, uncertain, and full of anxiety. We use social media like a drug, as a way of escaping from this anxiety for even a few hours.

Moldova - An Eastern European country with a population of 2.5 million. It is a former Soviet republic.

Pessimistic - Tending to believe that the worst will happen.

Frenetic - Fast, frantic and uncontrolled.

Elon Musk - A South African-born entrepreneur whose companies have included the online payment service PayPal. He now controls Twitter, renamed 'X'.