It’s Time to Admit Consumer Education Can’t Deliver Tech Accountability

When writer, civil-rights activist, and educator Toni Cade Bambara asked, “What are we pretending not to know today?” she was identifying willful blindness as a mechanism for avoiding inconvenient truths. The question is both a pedagogical and political intervention. It is designed to disrupt what philosopher Paulo Freire called the “culture of silence,” or the social consensus among marginalized groups that remains unspoken at their expense. It calls on the disenfranchised to vocalize their latent understanding of the complex issues that plague them and demands that privileged individuals in elite circles confront their own complicity in that silence. Essentially, Bambara’s provocation asserts that we already possess the information, see the patterns, and comprehend structural inequality. The real question is, why are we acting like we don’t?

As an internet researcher studying disinformation that targets Black communities, I see this dynamic constantly in conversations about information pollution. A pervasive stereotype frames Black people as uneducated, and this bias causes people to overdetermine the role of individual ignorance in the proliferation of bad information online. At the same time, systemic failures in the US that are central to causing the problem, i.e., cuts to educational funding, sophisticated disinformation campaigns that specifically target Black people and other people of color, and the algorithms designed for amplifying bad information and harmful discourse, are neglected.

When attention is paid to the unique harms Black people face in terms of consuming bad information online, researchers and policymakers often sidestep the root causes, promoting individualistic solutions like media literacy training instead. This approach fails because the most effective antidotes are intangible, i.e., the foundational importance of social trust, narrative strategy, cultural context, and relational accountability. These are precisely the human connections and localized knowledge that current technocratic frameworks ignore, simply because they cannot be scaled, metricized, bought, or sold.