The study reveals that only 36 per cent of nine- to 16-year-olds say they know more about the internet than their parents. This myth has obscured children's need for support in developing digital skills. The "stranger danger" fear is also something of a myth: most (87 per cent) of 11-16-year-olds are in touch online with people they know face to face. Only 9 per cent of children have met up with someone they first met online. Very few went unaccompanied or met someone older and only 1 per cent had a negative experience. As for the "everyone watches porn online" myth, one in seven children saw sexual images online. The report concludes: "The media hype over pornography is based on unrepresentative samples or just supposition."

The internet was intended as a 21st-century Agora but algorithms have changed the rules of the game. If you and I Google something at the same time our results will be different, because Google takes our location, our past searches and other factors into account when it shows us our results. 

Since December 2009, Google has customised searches for each user. Instead of showing us what is objectively the most popular result, it shows us the result it deems as most relevant to us, so that we are more likely to click on it. Similarly, Facebook shows us updates we are more likely to comment on. Twitter also doesn't show the entirety of tweets of everyone we follow, but applies a kind of quality score system. After all, they are for-profit companies that rely on our eyeballs to spend time on and return to their sites.

Eli Pariser, internet activist and chief executive of the viral content-sharing site Upworthy, sees this as a dangerous development. He argues that the result is a "filter bubble" which is "a unique universe of information" that surrounds each of us. This means that we are less likely to encounter ideas or political views unlike our own. When we flick through a newspaper we see articles on topics we were not specifically looking for. When we wander through a physical library we are likely to discover something unexpected. In many cases it is possible to turn off personalisation settings on websites, or at least be aware of them. Otherwise, the world of algorithms invites us to sit in our own exclusive club, eating the same kind of sandwich day in day out while discussing the same topics with the usual suspects.

In his book Writing on the Wall: Social Media — The First 2,000 Years (Bloomsbury), Tom Standage argues that the world of social media is the norm while the era of mass media was an anomaly. He explains that social media-defined as "media we get from other people, exchanged along social connections" — can be traced back to ancient Rome, where letters were copied and shared on papyrus rolls. This mode of communication reappeared thereafter, prior to the era of mass communication.

Distrusting the media is not a new phenomenon either. Long before the invention of the printing press, Socrates was suspicious of the written word. He feared that it travelled beyond the possibility of question and revision, and thus beyond trust. But as time passes so will our worries. The Pew Research Centre report Digital Life in 2025 argues that the internet will become "like electricity-less visible, yet more deeply embedded in people's lives for good and ill". 

Social media won't make us geniuses or morons. They won't bring about world peace, nor will they create a fake world of empty experiences. Social media would be without meaning or content if it wasn't for those who use it-us.