Social media in light of Plato’s allegory of the cave

Allegory of the cave is an allegory written by the Greek philosopher Plato. In this allegory, Plato pictured all people were born in a cave, where they can see only shadows of objects and not their real form as they do not know any better. He then pictured the philosophers as people who escaped the cave and saw the real forms of objects. Plato believes that it’s the philosophers' job to help the cave prisoners to escape the cave. so, Plato introduced the “Socratic method”. Philosophers who have escaped the cave should start by letting the cave prisoners confidentially express their opinion and start investigating this opinion to help those prisoners detect errors in their own reasoning. - Social media are virtual communities that allow people to share thoughts, ideas, and information. These communities have been spreading widely to contain people with different cultures, habits, races, education levels, and Standard of living. This diversity and spreading of social media lead to diversity in the topics and thoughts as well to include philosophy, history, science, fashion, and sports. - At first glance, This diverse virtual community may seem like a great tool that could help free more prisoners from their caves. Social media helps enlightened philosophers to reach out to many more prisoners and try to set them free from their caves in a more effective way. Through social media, people can apply the Socratic method in a much more practical way, they can express their thoughts, discuss them with others and try to detect errors in their own reasoning to escape their caves. However, this perfect picture of social media is not the usual case. There are many cases where social media becomes an enforcer of the cave more than a liberator from it. The algorithm of many popular social media applications tries to gather similar communities. For example, if you think the earth is flat, social media applications would try to show you posts, videos, and people who believe in the flat earth. This algorithm does not just hold people in their cave, it deepens that cave by increasing the prisoners' confidence about their shadow thoughts, and widens the gap between the enlightened people and the prisoners. Plato in his allegory believed that trying to drag prisoners out by attacking their ideas and cast blame on their reasoning is not the route to enlighten their prisoners but that would make those prisoners reject the enlightenment journey. On social media, enforcing ideas and making fun of other people's thinking is very common. This phenomenon makes people stick to their beliefs and reject to critically analyze them. This makes the process of prisoners' enlightenment almost impossible and causes more people to stick to their caves. Another evidence of social media's bad influence is that many people on social media are influenced by people, not ideas. Influencers are popular people on social media who have many following their daily content, however, those influencers may have a positive influence, there are many cases where those influencers use their popularity to spread doubted thoughts whether this is on purpose or not. For example, an influencer was trying to experiment with how his followers could be influenced by his ideas without questioning them. He posted that a certain movie is overrated without watching the movie. The rate of the movie was extremely lowered one day after that post. This example shows that social media influencers could enforce their followers to new caves. - To sum up, social media might be a liberator from the cave for those who know that they are in a cave. Those who are educated well, have good critical thinking and know a little about philosophy would find social media a great tool to liberate them from their caves as they could criticize what they read and choose carefully who to be enlightened by, and use social media to detect errors in their own reasoning not to force proving it right. However, for the majority of social media users, the algorithm of gathering similar ideas, wrong discussion methods and the effect of social media influencers would increase cave prisoners, deepen their caves, and complicate the process of enlightenment. Social media enforces people to the cave much more than it liberates others from it, so I consider it as an enforcer of the cave as long as the majority of people do not know that they are in the cave