Anti-Intellectualism, Social Media, and the Rise of Online Experts

This past week, “celebrity life coach” and “wellness expert” “Dr.” Cheyenne Bryant faced public backlash after questions emerged about whether her doctoral degree could be verified. I found the backlash interesting for several reasons. A couple of years ago, Bryant appeared on Cam Newton’s podcast, where her comments about relationships and Black men struck me as problematic, inaccurate, and clinically unserious. She was positioned as a psychologist, yet it was clear to me that she was not licensed. I also found it ironic that she had recently appeared on a reality television program that promotes conflict among Black women, exploits them for entertainment, endorses class aspiration, and reproduces classism. I mentioned this concern in a Twitter post at the time.

Bryant is responsible for how she represents her credentials. But responsibility does not stop with her. Podcasters, television programs, other media outlets, and social media culture also bear responsibility for manufacturing and circulating expertise without verification. It is not difficult to verify whether someone is licensed or whether a claimed degree comes from an accredited institution. Yet over the past 16 years, alongside the rise of social media, I have witnessed the expansion of anti-intellectualism, credential inflation, and platformed misinformation.

This is not simply a failure of verification. It reflects a broader culture of information avoidance, where available knowledge is ignored because it would interrupt the preferred narrative, entertainment value, or platform economy surrounding a public figure. Research on information avoidance shows that people often avoid available information when it threatens existing beliefs, requires unwanted action, or produces emotional discomfort (Sweeny et al., 2010). In this context, verifying credentials would require podcasters, media outlets, and audiences to confront the possibility that the authority they helped construct was unstable from the beginning.

Information avoidance is not always passive. Hertwig and Engel (2016) describe deliberate ignorance as the conscious choice not to seek or use available knowledge. Woolley and Risen (2018) similarly show that people may avoid information not only to protect their feelings, but to protect a preferred decision. This matters because social media platforms are not merely confused about expertise. They often benefit from not knowing. Verification can disrupt the spectacle. It can interrupt the brand. It can force accountability where ambiguity is profitable.

The Rise of Anti-Intellectualism

There appears to be a growing disdain for experts, particularly in areas such as mental health, economics, relationships, and social analysis. This disdain is often accompanied by envy, suspicion, and resentment toward formal expertise. A segment of the population appears to believe that the work of therapists, economists, scholars, and researchers can be replicated through charisma, personal opinion, viral clips, or “lived experience.”

Critiques of formal education and credentialing systems are not inherently invalid. Credentialing institutions can reproduce elitism, gatekeeping, exclusion, and hierarchy. Formal education is not, by itself, a marker of critical thinking, nor does it automatically indicate original knowledge production. There are many credentialed people who are not thoughtful, and there are people without formal credentials who are intellectually serious.

But that is not the same as saying credentials do not matter. In regulated professions, credentials exist to establish baseline knowledge, training, supervision, ethical obligations, demonstrated competencies, and public accountability. These standards do not guarantee brilliance, but they provide a minimal structure of responsibility. When those standards are dismissed entirely, the public becomes vulnerable to charismatic misinformation disguised as expertise.

This distinction is especially important in mental health. Therapy is not simply giving advice. It is not the performance of confidence. It is not diagnosing people in public based on fragments of behavior. It is not humiliating people for entertainment. Clinical work requires training, ethics, supervision, humility, and an understanding of process. When media platforms collapse all of this into personality-driven advice, they distort what therapy is and what competent practice requires.

Black Media, Manufactured Conflict, and Relationship Discourse

Many Black media personalities and platforms appear to prefer superficial and sassy soundbites over serious conversation. There is a repeated obsession with romantic relationships between Black women and men, often staged through conflict, accusation, humiliation, and gender-essentialist narratives. These conversations are rarely designed to inform. They are designed to provoke.

This obsession is not accidental. It is shaped partly by the sex ratio imbalance between Black women and men, where there are approximately 2 million more Black women than men. This imbalance is largely driven by the incarceration and premature deaths of Black men, which significantly affects Black women and men who desire romantic relationships with Black men. Yet instead of treating these conditions structurally, media platforms often convert them into spectacle (Cooper, forthcoming).

The result is a feedback loop of ignorance and noise pollution. Complex social conditions are reduced to gender blame. Structural violence is reframed as personal failure. Pain is turned into content. The goal is not clarity. The goal is controversy, engagement, and monetization.

Much of this commentary is presented as truism rather than analysis. Claims are offered as common-sense knowledge, as though repetition, confidence, or cultural familiarity makes them true. This is sensationalism disguised as insight. But common sense is often where ideology hides. When unsupported claims are presented as obvious truths, misinformation becomes difficult to challenge because disagreement is framed as denial rather than inquiry.

This pattern is part of a broader apparatus of celebrity-mediated discourse. In Black Men and Racial Trauma, I argued that Black celebrities are often positioned as subject matter experts on issues affecting Black communities despite lacking the credentials or training to do so. They frequently speak in abstract, self-aggrandizing terms about “representing the culture” or “moving the culture forward,” while generating provocative conversations that are not supported by research. The result is not public education, but distraction, confusion, and the diversion of attention away from issues affecting Black working-class people (Cooper, 2024).

This is how anti-intellectualism becomes profitable. It rewards confidence over competence, performance over study, and visibility over accountability. A person does not need to understand Black relationships, Black men, Black women, mental health, economics, or structural inequality. They only need to speak with certainty, generate conflict, and be useful to a platform economy that treats attention as truth.

Lived Experience Is Not Expertise

Expertise often takes many years to develop. It does not come from reading a single book, watching videos, having an opinion, or claiming “lived experience.” Lived experience matters, but it is not the same as research, theory, clinical training, or disciplined study. It can provide insight, but it can also reproduce bias, projection, resentment, and overgeneralization.

“Lived experience” is often used to legitimize oneself as a subject matter expert in place of research and study. This is especially common in public conversations about relationships, mental health, and Black families. A person may have experienced a relationship, a breakup, a marriage, a divorce, childhood pain, or professional success, but that does not make them an expert on attachment, trauma, sex ratios, intimate partner dynamics, Black family systems, or clinical intervention.

Relationships among Black people require extended discussions that include nuance and complexity. They cannot be reduced to gender-essentialist soundbites. As someone who specializes in Black relationships, I have found that many public conversations about Black relationships are uninformed, myth-driven, and superficial (Cooper & Holmes, 2023). This includes conversations led by both “experts” and non-experts.

The problem is not that everyone needs a doctorate to speak. The problem is that people who have not studied an issue often speak with greater certainty than those who have. Social media rewards that certainty. Serious expertise often sounds slower, more careful, and less sensational. That makes it less compatible with platforms that reward conflict, speed, and emotional intensity.

Extraction, Spectacle, and Refusing the Platform

I have been invited to participate in a documentary on Michael Jackson, serve as a therapist on reality television programs, and appear in a documentary series focused on Black couples. I declined these invitations because I found them extractive and exploitative.

These programs were not primarily invested in healing, truth, or education. The subjects would be exploited, and my expertise would be extracted and used to legitimize the medium. I would have little or no control over my image, how my words were edited, or how the final product would frame me.

My refusal was ethical. I am not for sale, and I have no aspirations of fame.

This matters because media platforms often seek professionals not because they respect expertise, but because expertise can legitimize spectacle. A therapist, professor, physician, or researcher can be used as institutional decoration. Their presence gives the appearance of seriousness while the program continues to operate through exploitation. The expert becomes a prop. The suffering person becomes content. The audience becomes a market.

Therapy as Spectacle

Black therapists often receive differential treatment across media platforms. They are frequently positioned within narrow tropes and expected to perform a recognizable role rather than demonstrate clinical depth. Therapy becomes spectacle. The therapist becomes an adversary, a mind reader, a judge, a disciplinarian, a “big homie,” or a moral authority. The therapeutic encounter is then framed as a battle of wills, where the therapist is expected to overpower, expose, or correct the client rather than attend to what is happening intrapsychically and interpersonally.

This bears little resemblance to therapy. Developing a relationship with a client takes time. Therapy is a process. It requires assessment, attunement, pacing, context, and humility. It is not a public confrontation. It is not psychic certainty about what is in a person’s mind. It is not humiliating someone under the guise of truth-telling.

This dynamic is not new. Imber-Black’s discussion of “talk show myths about secrets” identified the toxic assumptions embedded in televised disclosure, including the belief that painful material can be exposed without regard to relationships, that disclosure is automatically healing, that strangers have the right to judge without knowing the full story, and that a brief encounter with an unaccountable “expert” can resolve complex problems (Imber-Black, 1999). These myths remain visible in contemporary media therapy, where revelation, confrontation, and public judgment are often mistaken for healing.

Many Black therapists also participate in this distortion. Some engage in advice-giving, public shaming, or trope performance. Some reproduce mammy, sapphire, or “big homie” roles in ways that may entertain audiences but do not model effective therapy. Simply giving advice is not good therapy. It is not process-oriented, and it does not produce second-order change. It is often lazy and contributes to widespread misunderstanding about what therapy is and what therapy is not.

This is part of the broader problem. When therapy is reduced to performance, expertise becomes indistinguishable from entertainment. Audiences begin to believe that the loudest or most confident person is the most knowledgeable. Platforms then reward the performance and punish complexity.

The Platform Economy of False Authority

The controversy surrounding Cheyenne Bryant is not only about one person’s credentials. It is about an ecosystem that manufactures authority without accountability. In this ecosystem, credentials are invoked when useful and ignored when inconvenient. Expertise is demanded when it can be monetized, but dismissed when it requires rigor, standards, or correction.

Podcasters, television programs, social media personalities, and audiences all participate in this economy. The platform gets content. The personality gets visibility. The audience gets stimulation. But the public often receives misinformation.

Sociological research on Twitter/X shows that social media platforms do not merely host conversations; they shape public discourse, facilitate misinformation, amplify influencer dynamics, and organize how communities, movements, and identities become visible. In this sense, platforms help determine not only what circulates, but who becomes legible as an authority (Murthy, 2024).

This is why credential verification matters. It is not elitism to ask whether someone is trained, licensed, supervised, or qualified to speak on specialized matters. It is a basic form of public protection. In mental health, the stakes are not abstract. Bad information can shape how people understand themselves, their relationships, their families, and their suffering.

The issue is not that only credentialed people can think. The issue is that unverified authority, when amplified by media systems, can produce real harm. It can normalize false claims. It can distort clinical concepts. It can intensify anti-Black myths. It can turn Black suffering into entertainment while calling itself healing.

Conclusion

Social media has not democratized expertise. It has democratized access to platforms, which is not the same thing. Access without accountability can produce a culture where anyone can become an expert if they are entertaining enough, provocative enough, attractive enough, or useful enough to the platform economy.

Anti-intellectualism thrives in this environment because it flatters the audience. It tells people they do not need to study, verify, read, train, or think deeply. It tells them that confidence is knowledge and visibility is legitimacy. It tells them that expertise is elitism, while selling them personalities who mimic expertise for profit.

The deeper problem is not ignorance alone. It is the organized reward structure around ignorance. It is the deliberate refusal to verify. It is the preference for spectacle over study. It is the substitution of entertainment for education.

A serious culture would not be threatened by expertise. It would know how to question it, verify it, challenge it, and learn from it. What we have instead is a media environment where the performance of expertise often travels farther than knowledge itself.

That is not democratization. It is intellectual decay.

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References

Ayoola, E. (2026, May 15). Cheyenne Bryant speaks out following backlash over her credentials, says she’s “earned” Dr. title. Essence. https://www.essence.com/lifestyle/cheyenne-bryant-degree

Cooper, Y. (2024). Black men and racial trauma: Impacts, disparities, and interventions. Routledge.

Cooper, Y. (forthcoming). Scarcity and scapegoats: Sex ratios, desire, and the demonization of Black men. In Y. Cooper (Ed.), Black male sexuality: Race, genre, and class. Cambridge University Press.

Cooper, Y., & Holmes, E. (Eds.). (2023). Black couples therapy: Clinical theory and practice. Cambridge University Press.

Hertwig, R., & Engel, C. (2016). Homo ignorans: Deliberately choosing not to know. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(3), 359–372.

Imber-Black, E. (1999). The secret life of families: Making decisions about secrets: When keeping secrets can harm you, when keeping secrets can heal you, and how to know the difference. Bantam Books.

Murthy, D. (2024). Sociology of Twitter/X: Trends, challenges, and future research directions. Annual Review of Sociology, 50(1), 169-190.

Sweeny, K., Melnyk, D., Miller, W., & Shepperd, J. A. (2010). Information avoidance: Who, what, when, and why. Review of General Psychology, 14(4), 340–353.

Woolley, K., & Risen, J. L. (2018). Closing your eyes to follow your heart: Avoiding information to protect a strong intuitive preference. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(2), 230–245.

YouTube. (2024, August 23). Cam Newton podcast interview with Cheyenne Bryant [Video].