The expression “wisdom of crowds” is the idea that large groups of people can collectively outperform individual experts when it comes to problem-solving, decision-making, innovating, and predicting. However, it is often the case that social influence undermines collective wisdom by reducing the diversity of opinions within the crowd. This is even more so given the bombardment of real and/or fake news from a dizzyingly wide range of media: newspapers (print and online), radio, television, social media (YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, X-Twitter etc.). It would perhaps be more appropriate to use the expression “the wisdom of the masses”.

I would suggest that British democracy took a big blow when, in the case of Brexit, it decided to go with the wisdom of the masses. British democracy seems to have shifted away from the aggregated knowledge of reasonably educated and intelligent people who participate in a small number of well-informed debates in committees and in parliament to the wisdom of large crowds that are blown hither and thither with the dictates of the day whether it be phobia of immigrants or some other crude expression of a rancid ideology.