11/08/2026
Idiots a platform for advertisers! Why literacy standards have declined, fools are gullible.
He spent his career studying how meaning gets built, distorted, and weaponised.
Then, at 83 years old, he stood outside a university ceremony and said plainly what he thought the internet was doing to all of it.
Umberto Eco was born on January 5, 1932, in Alessandria, Italy. He built his reputation across decades as a philosopher and semiotician — a scholar of signs, symbols, and the mechanics of how meaning is constructed in language, art, and media. His foundational academic work appeared throughout the 1960s and 1970s, published through the University of Bologna, where Eco taught from 1971 until the end of his life.
In 1980, at age 48, he published his first novel.
The Name of the Rose was a historical mystery set inside a 14th-century Italian monastery, built around a central question: what happens when those who control books also control what people are permitted to believe? The novel sold more than 30 million copies worldwide by Eco's own account and was translated into dozens of languages, turning him from an influential academic into one of the most widely read authors in the world.
Eco went on to collect more than 30 honorary doctorates from institutions across the globe over the course of his career.
In June 2015, he received one more — an honorary degree in communication and media culture from the University of Turin.
After the ceremony, speaking to journalists outside, Eco delivered remarks that spread far beyond the courtyard where he said them.
His comments were first reported by the Italian newspaper La Stampa. Eco said social media had given legions of idiots a public platform they had never previously possessed. In an earlier era, he observed, such people would have spoken at a bar after a glass of wine, reaching perhaps three or four listeners before being ignored. The conversation would end there.
Remember the comparison he drew next.
Eco argued that a random social media user now commanded the same platform, in terms of raw visibility, as a Nobel Prize winner. The reach was identical. The credentials were not. And the audience, increasingly, could not tell the difference.
He went further, drawing on decades of earlier writing about television's effect on public discourse. Eco said TV had once elevated the village idiot to someone viewers could still feel superior to — a passive figure on a screen, easy to dismiss. The internet, he argued, had done something qualitatively different: it had turned that same figure into a trusted source of truth for significant numbers of people. That shift, he said, was new. And it was dangerous.
Some commentators responded with accusations of elitism, arguing Eco was dismissing the genuine value of ordinary people's voices in public life.
Others argued he was making a narrower point — not about anyone's inherent worth or right to speak, but about verification, expertise, and the collapse of any shared standard for evaluating what was true. They pointed to his earlier academic writing, in which Eco had argued repeatedly that schools bore the primary responsibility for teaching people how to read, evaluate, and challenge information critically.
Eco had explored this territory in his fiction long before that interview.
In his 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum, Eco described four categories of people he called cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics — a taxonomy built not around intelligence but around how people relate to evidence, expertise, and their own certainty. The framework was comedic on its surface and entirely serious underneath.
He was not calling for social media to be shut down or censored.
He was describing something he had spent fifty years studying: the relationship between control over information and control over what people believe. He had watched it operate through religious institutions in the 14th century as he wrote The Name of the Rose. He had watched it operate through television as he built his academic work on mass media. And in June 2015, standing outside a university in Turin, he watched it operate through a smartphone in every pocket.
Umberto Eco died on February 19, 2016. He was 84 years old. The cause was pancreatic cancer, diagnosed two years earlier. He died at home in Milan, roughly eight months after that widely circulated interview.
He left behind novels, essays, and academic texts spanning more than five decades, including The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and The Island of the Day Before, published in 1994.
His 2015 warning continues to circulate nearly a decade later, surfacing regularly in debates about misinformation, platform responsibility, and the erosion of shared standards for truth.
It is frequently quoted without its original context.
It is frequently softened, or sharpened, depending on the argument the person quoting it happens to be making at the time.
Which is, in a way, exactly what Eco spent his life writing about.
Tag someone who needs to read the original, not the quote card.
