There is a brief period after something happens when almost nobody understands it, but everybody is expected to have an opinion.
A headline appears. A fragment of video begins circulating. Politicians issue statements before the facts have settled, while social media asks ordinary people to choose a side before they have had time to identify the question.
“I don’t know yet” should be an honest answer. Increasingly, it sounds like a failure.
I have begun to notice how often certainty arrives before information. We are invited to declare what an event means while the event itself is still unfolding. A person who pauses risks looking evasive. A person who speaks immediately, and forcefully, can look informed even when they know no more than anyone else.
This is not only a problem for politicians or journalists. It reaches the rest of us through the ordinary rituals of being online. We see something between messages from friends, photographs of somebody’s dinner and an advert for a coat. Within seconds, we are no longer simply reading. We are being asked to react.
The reaction becomes part of the story.
When I began building The Hollamby Review, I had to decide what opinion should mean on its pages. The easiest answer would have been certainty: choose a position, defend it forcefully and make every article sound conclusive. But that would reproduce the kind of writing I wanted this newspaper to resist. I want to publish arguments with a human being still visible inside them—someone capable of conviction, but also of pausing, learning and being changed.
In Britain, social media is now a routine route into public life. Ofcom found in 2025 that 51 per cent of UK adults used social media for news. Among 16- to 24-year-olds, the figure was three quarters. This does not mean that half the country believes everything it sees online. It means that news often reaches us in spaces designed for movement, response and display.
A newspaper article can ask for ten minutes. A social feed asks for half a second, then offers the next thing.
The result is not simply that we know less. It is that we are encouraged to perform knowing more than we do.
The performance of certainty
Certainty is well suited to the internet. It fits into a caption. It makes a clean headline. It gives an audience somebody to applaud or condemn.
Uncertainty is harder to package. It contains qualifications. It may require us to hold two thoughts at once: that an allegation is serious and that it has not yet been proven; that a policy has caused real harm and that its full effects are not yet known; that a person can be wrong without being beyond redemption.
These are not exciting sentences. They do not make good slogans. They may, however, be true.
Research gives us some idea of the incentives surrounding them. A study of more than 95,000 articles from four British and American news organisations found that negative stories were 1.91 times as likely to be shared on social media. The researchers did not claim that every negative story was distorted, nor that readers should avoid difficult news. Their finding was narrower and more useful: negativity travels.
Another study examined more than 35 million public Facebook posts containing links. It found that around three quarters of forwarded links were shared without the person clicking through first.
That statistic is almost too neat, and it should be read with care. It concerns public Facebook posts, not every reader on every platform. Yet it captures something recognisable. A headline can now be treated as both evidence and conclusion. We can distribute an argument before we have encountered it.
In such a system, the advantage belongs to the first clear account, not necessarily the most accurate one. By the time a fuller version appears, the early version may already have gathered outrage, loyalty and a community around it. A correction does not arrive on an empty page. It arrives in a room where people have chosen their seats.
A pause is not an escape
There is an obvious objection to all this. “I don’t know” can be used dishonestly. Powerful people have often hidden behind uncertainty when the evidence was inconvenient. Calls for patience can become instructions to tolerate injustice. Endless requests for more proof can ensure that nothing is ever done.
We should recognise that tactic when we see it.
But bad-faith doubt is not the same as honest uncertainty. One avoids a conclusion because it would demand something of us. The other delays a conclusion because the truth deserves more than our first impression.
The difference can be tested. Honest uncertainty has a shape. It can say what is known, what remains unclear and what evidence would change the judgement. Evasion simply moves the threshold whenever the evidence reaches it.
There are moments when the available facts are sufficient and refusing to take a position is itself a position. There are also moments when urgency is manufactured, not by events, but by an audience that wants immediate moral theatre.
We need to be able to tell those moments apart.
For me, “I don’t know yet” does not mean “I do not care”. Often it means the opposite. It means I care enough not to turn another person’s life into material for a quick display of my own goodness. It means I am trying to leave room for facts that may complicate the version I would prefer to be true.
That room has become politically important.
The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report found that social media and video networks had become the most widely used source of news across the 48 markets it studied. At the same time, trust in news fell to 37 per cent, the lowest level recorded since the survey began measuring it in 2015. We are receiving more of public life through systems built for immediacy while becoming less confident in what we receive.
Perhaps that contradiction explains some of the aggression around certainty. When trust is scarce, confidence can act as a substitute. The person who sounds least troubled by doubt can appear most dependable.
But confidence is a style. Accuracy is a discipline.
The right to change
The punishment for uncertainty is closely related to the punishment for changing one’s mind.
Old statements can be retrieved in seconds. A revised opinion is placed beside an earlier one and presented as evidence of hypocrisy. Sometimes it is. Politicians regularly alter their principles for convenience and hope nobody will notice.
Yet consistency is not automatically integrity. A person who keeps the same opinion after the evidence changes is not principled. They are merely stationary.
We should ask better questions. What changed? Was the earlier belief sincerely held? Has the person explained the evidence or experience that moved them? Does their new position cost them anything, or only make life easier?
A culture that never permits revision does not produce honest people. It produces people who conceal their doubts until they can be certain which answer is safest.
I would rather read somebody thinking carefully in public than watch them defend a bad claim because admitting error would be treated as surrender. I would rather a newspaper show me where the evidence is incomplete than disguise a gap with a louder headline. Opinion should not mean certainty without responsibility: a strong argument should show where fact ends, interpretation begins and the evidence might yet prove it wrong.
This does not make writing bloodless. Conviction matters. Anger has its place. Some facts should disturb us, and some decisions require courage before perfect knowledge is possible.
The point is not to wait until doubt disappears. It never will. The point is to know which doubts are significant, and to be honest about the ones we carry into a conclusion.
Making room for thought
There are small ways to resist the demand for instant judgement. We can read beyond the headline before sharing it, look for the original report rather than a screenshot of somebody describing it, and ask what happened before and after the clipped minute we have been given. Most importantly, we can stop treating every pause as cowardice.
None of this will make public debate quiet. Nor should it. Democracy depends upon disagreement, criticism and the willingness to speak before those in power would prefer us to. But disagreement is more valuable when it concerns the world as it is, not merely the first version that reached our screens.
“I don’t know yet” is not the end of thought. It is a promise to continue.
Curiosity is not the absence of conviction. It is the discipline of allowing evidence to reach you before certainty closes the door.