Imagine scrolling through your phone at the end of a long day. A video pops up from a wellness influencer telling you that a well-known vaccine can be replaced by natural herbs. The caption is bold, the comments are filled with people thanking her for “waking people up.” You are tired, you are worried about your family’s health, and that post looks as polished as anything a doctor might share. This is not a rare scenario. Pew Research Center has documented that most Americans use some form of social media (Gottfried, 2024; Auxier & Anderson, 2021), and surveys suggest that…

On a heavy, smoke-filled Thursday in South Africa, the rhythms of ordinary life were violently broken. In the coastal city of Durban, police moved through the urban centre as five cars burned in the streets, and shops owned by foreign nationals were ransacked. In Soweto, the Johannesburg township whose name still echoes with the struggle against apartheid, residents were seen walking out of a store carrying groceries after the Somali owner had been chased away. The police arrived, dispersed the crowds, and tried to restore order. But the damage was already done. The burning vehicles and looted shelves were not…