Social media allows people to disconnect from reality and live in a political fantasy world which perfectly fits their prejudices while feeling fully connected with reality. These same people then vote in elections.The end of a shared truth will be the death of democracy.

Higher education clearly provides a certain degree of immunity to this virtualisation of political belief, and that's partly by endowing people with better information sifting skills, but perhaps more importantly it inculcates them with respect for evidence based reasoning.

To get on in the everyday world we don't need any special regard for evidence based reasoning. Our knowledge about the everyday world is mostly reliable and gathered unthinkingly. Methods and values regarding knowledge acquisition are unnecessary.

So when people schooled in everyday life encounter the informational chaos of social media they lack the means to sift out truth, and the values which matter to them, values reflected in their prejudices, will govern what they choose to believe.

But when you've received some academic schooling, then sometimes even when you see a piece of information you want to believe, a little voice tends to whisper - 'do some checking', and quite often in my case that checking doesn't deliver the desired result.