Speaker 1: Welcome to How to Citizen with Baritune Day, a podcast
Speaker 1: that reimagine citizen as a verb, not a legal status.
Speaker 1: This season is all about tech and how it can
Speaker 1: bring us together instead of tearing us apart. We're bringing
Speaker 1: you the people using technology for so much more than
Speaker 1: revenue and user growth. They're using it to help us
Speaker 1: citizen Alright, play let's destroy society. Congratulations, you're hired. Welcome
Speaker 1: to your first day as our new chief disinformation officer.
Speaker 1: Let's get started. We hired you two, So discord and
Speaker 1: chaos on Harmony Square. That's what's up. That's what I'm
Speaker 1: here for. Who are we about to flog up? So
Speaker 1: right now I'm playing Harmony Square. Normally this game doesn't
Speaker 1: have music or sound, but my team took some creative
Speaker 1: liberties to bring you into the experience with me, and
Speaker 1: clearly I'm having way too much fun about to sew
Speaker 1: some chaos. Harmony Square is a green and pleasant place.
Speaker 1: It's famous for its living statue, it's majestic Palm Swan,
Speaker 1: and its annual pineapple Pizza festival. Any place that does
Speaker 1: a pineapple pizza festival deserves some discord. Yeah, pineapple pizza
Speaker 1: that's disgusted. Now, the goal of this game is to
Speaker 1: disturb this hypothetical quaint small towns piece and quiet by
Speaker 1: fomenting internal divisions and pitting its residence against each other.
Speaker 1: I am oddly excited about the prospect. There are no
Speaker 1: bears here, never have been. But how many Square loves
Speaker 1: elections so much they keep voting for a bear patroller? Anyway,
Speaker 1: one of the ways you get to divide this absurd
Speaker 1: little town is through an election. It's for bear patrollers,
Speaker 1: and there's only one candidate, Ashley Plute. What kind of
Speaker 1: language do you think is most likely to ruin the
Speaker 1: bear patroller election? Tears and fears or facts and logic
Speaker 1: tears and fears. So as I'm going through the game,
Speaker 1: I'm getting presented with these choices for how I intervene,
Speaker 1: and I got real excited about the chance to make
Speaker 1: fake news means. Since you're so clever, why don't you
Speaker 1: choose some electrifying buzzwords to including your mean. I get
Speaker 1: to pick three buzzwords, O, corrupt, abuse, and lie. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're taking Plute down. Now you can put together an
Speaker 1: emotionally abusive meaning. So I decided to go with this
Speaker 1: meet it shows that too white dudes handshaking above the table,
Speaker 1: but underneath, money's changing hands unopposed. It's just a fancy
Speaker 1: word for corrupt. Careful though you posted some content that
Speaker 1: wasn't emotionally exploitative cost you a couple of lives, the
Speaker 1: megaphone will be much more successful if you use the
Speaker 1: right buzzwords. Damn alright, coach, Yeah, this is mad devious,
Speaker 1: like this is This is by far the best thing
Speaker 1: I've seen that explains this. Like, I'm bright, Bart, you
Speaker 1: know this is wonderful, and by wonderful I mean terrible.
Speaker 1: This is a really twisted game because I thought I
Speaker 1: was playing it aggressively by choosing to disparage a newscaster
Speaker 1: on a small scale, you know, talking trash to a
Speaker 1: friend or a family member. It turns out the game
Speaker 1: is like, that's not devious enough. You must scale your deception,
Speaker 1: and so it encouraged me to kind of create a
Speaker 1: more public platform for the disinformation. Hell with responsibility. That's
Speaker 1: crack it up to eleven. I'm trying to destroy the time.
Speaker 1: Like this game has really got me. Why they even
Speaker 1: call it harmony square? I think that's what bothers me.
Speaker 1: I want to make it Discord Square. Let's go. Can
Speaker 1: we get some tiny violin music up in here? You
Speaker 1: did it. You ruined the biggest moment in Harmony squares history.
Speaker 1: They're all at each other's throats now, okay, in the end,
Speaker 1: let's see, still counting, you have reached fifty six thousand
Speaker 1: four followers. You did better than eight of the people
Speaker 1: who knew simulating the emotional destruction of a small town
Speaker 1: could be so much fun and that I'd be so
Speaker 1: good at it. I mean, it's fun, but it's also scary. Now.
Speaker 1: Harmony Square is a fictional place obsessed with democracy electing
Speaker 1: bear patrollers, But other than the bear patrol thing, it's
Speaker 1: pretty similar to the world we live in right now.
Speaker 1: The election has cast a light on misinformation online, and
Speaker 1: it's fust election stories from foak sites and dangers of
Speaker 1: fake news. Ever since the presidential election, our internet has
Speaker 1: become increasingly more divisive, with fake news spreading like wildfire.
Speaker 1: And combating all this misinformation that can feel like you're
Speaker 1: playing whack a mole. You take one down, three more
Speaker 1: pop up, but in this case, millions more pop up,
Speaker 1: whether it's misleading headlines, divisive memes, or trolls and these
Speaker 1: little rodents they're borrowing into the fabric of our society.
Speaker 1: It's kind of maddening and admittedly disgusting with the whole
Speaker 1: rodent metaphor. After a few years into this fake news ecosystem,
Speaker 1: social scientists are seeing how easily we can fall prey
Speaker 1: to some of our basest human instincts, and fear is
Speaker 1: a hell of a drug and a terrible motivator. As
Speaker 1: we click, shape, air, and retweet about the pandemic racial injustice,
Speaker 1: climate change, and more, many of us have become aware
Speaker 1: of how deep and dark the pit of social media
Speaker 1: can be, but few of us have had the chance
Speaker 1: to drive that descent like I got to do in
Speaker 1: the fake world of Harmony Square. But Harmony Square isn't
Speaker 1: just reflecting real world problems in a cute way. It's
Speaker 1: helping us battle them too. Yes, a game can help
Speaker 1: us fight misinformation and disinformation. Believe it or not, this
Speaker 1: game was preparing me to fight off trolls by getting
Speaker 1: inside their heads. In other words, it's like a fake
Speaker 1: news vaccine. Sander vander Linden is one of the people
Speaker 1: behind Harmony Square. He's a professor of psychology, at the
Speaker 1: University of Cambridge, studying how people are influenced by social
Speaker 1: media and misinformation. His team of researchers have partnered with
Speaker 1: game developers to create several games just like Harmony Square.
Speaker 1: They called themselves Get This Bad News Games. Essentially, these
Speaker 1: are choose your own adventure games, all free to play online,
Speaker 1: and there are a real way that science can go
Speaker 1: out and reach people. But even he admits it's an
Speaker 1: ongoing struggle. If I told you that down your street
Speaker 1: and went to one of the restaurants, and you know,
Speaker 1: I got food poisoning was real bad. A week later,
Speaker 1: I tell you, oh, look listen, actually it wasn't that restaurant,
Speaker 1: it was another one. Every time you're going to pass
Speaker 1: by that restaurant, you've gotta thank food poisoning. After the break,
Speaker 1: sanders prescription for our social media ills and a lesson
Speaker 1: in Dutch salutations, what's up, Sander, Welcome to how to
Speaker 1: Citizen Pleasure to be on the show Dog. That's close.
Speaker 1: That's close. Yeah, correct, my terrible Dutch with the proper
Speaker 1: pronunciation hudnd Okay, Wow, that's good. That's good. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a you know, people say, oh, you know, Dutch
Speaker 1: and Germans pretty much the same, but but we feel
Speaker 1: strongly that there's a nuance nuance difference there. Your field
Speaker 1: of specialty is timely and it's fascinating about human decision
Speaker 1: making and influence and judgment and communication around all those things.
Speaker 1: Can you break down how you describe what you research?
Speaker 1: You know, at a very basic level, I try to
Speaker 1: research how people are influenced by information, how people are
Speaker 1: persuaded by ideas and information. And what I've become really
Speaker 1: interested in the last few years is how we can
Speaker 1: help people resist and detect attempts to manipulate us online
Speaker 1: but also offline when it comes to you know, fake
Speaker 1: news and misinformation, disinformation, all of those things. But also
Speaker 1: study you know the nature of how information spreads on
Speaker 1: social media and how that influences people and what is
Speaker 1: happening on these platforms. Where are people engaging in flame wars?
Speaker 1: And you know, why do we see polarization and social
Speaker 1: media a good thing or a bad thing? So very
Speaker 1: difficult and complex questions. When did you start down this path?
Speaker 1: I started out pretty late. I didn't necessarily come from
Speaker 1: a academic oriented family, and so I got a job.
Speaker 1: I thought that's the thing you need to do. You
Speaker 1: need to make some money and get a job going
Speaker 1: to the real world. And so that's what I did,
Speaker 1: And I actually ended up working at a bank and
Speaker 1: had a kind of a crisis in terms of what
Speaker 1: I was doing with my life, and so I decided
Speaker 1: to quit that job go back to school. And that's
Speaker 1: how I got into academia. And I think I was
Speaker 1: lucky that I got to work in a few jobs
Speaker 1: that I really didn't like. So I never looked back
Speaker 1: in terms of my own experience because what I got
Speaker 1: to do now, experiment on people is fun. Even when
Speaker 1: I was little, I loved experimenting on people and learning
Speaker 1: about how they react. And I would you know, I
Speaker 1: had set up elaborate schemes to see what people would do,
Speaker 1: just because of my curiosity and in human behavior. I
Speaker 1: hear you using the term misinformation and occasionally disinformation, and
Speaker 1: out in the wild, these terms are often used together.
Speaker 1: Sometimes there's a slash between them. Sometimes people use them interchangeably,
Speaker 1: even if they might not intend to. So for the
Speaker 1: record and for clarity, what is misinformation? What is disinformation?
Speaker 1: How are they different? That's a great question. I've defined
Speaker 1: misinformation as in a lot of the work, we're doing
Speaker 1: information that is simply false or incorrect, and so this
Speaker 1: can include things like simple journalistic errors, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: tell you whether it's misinforming people by accident or intentionally.
Speaker 1: And so, for me, disinformation is misinformation coupled with some
Speaker 1: psychological intend to deceive or harm other people. And that's
Speaker 1: also why people get more upset about certain kinds of
Speaker 1: disinformation than than others, because we can all forgive people
Speaker 1: for making honest mistakes and errors, but it's different when
Speaker 1: someone's targeting you or actively trying to dupe you. But
Speaker 1: it gets complex. Let me give you an example. Let's
Speaker 1: say that the Chicago Tribune, which is you know otherwise,
Speaker 1: I think the headline was doctor died shortly after receiving
Speaker 1: the COVID vaccine. Now, these were two independent events, and
Speaker 1: one might have nothing to do with the other. There's
Speaker 1: an investigation that was ongoing. But are you misinforming people
Speaker 1: by constructing a headline in that way? And so it's
Speaker 1: not only that there's these sort of fringe outlets spamming
Speaker 1: us with disinformation. Here's the question that they do that intentionally.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I think these are the complex bigger
Speaker 1: questions that we tried to study. The formulation of disinformation
Speaker 1: equals misinformation plus deceptive intent. That resonates with me. That's
Speaker 1: how I've tried to understand it. But what you just
Speaker 1: shared about the Chicago Tribune example reminds me that even misinformation,
Speaker 1: the innocent kind of version of disinformation, can be harmful,
Speaker 1: and both versions breed a level of mistrust overall. Because
Speaker 1: just my level of doubt is raised now about vaccines,
Speaker 1: about the Chicago Tribune, about Facebook, because I just don't
Speaker 1: know whether they intended it or not. Falseness is spreading
Speaker 1: throughout the land. I think that's a great point because
Speaker 1: even something that wasn't intentionally created to be harmful, let's
Speaker 1: say it was a mistake, it can then be used
Speaker 1: or weaponized by people who have a certain motivated or
Speaker 1: political view. So if you don't like the vaccine, this
Speaker 1: is now a great example for you to start sharing. See,
Speaker 1: you know, a doctor died because they got the vaccine,
Speaker 1: and so now it can be weaponized and used in
Speaker 1: social media for a cause that maybe it wasn't intended
Speaker 1: to serve. So something can start out as misinformation and
Speaker 1: then become disinformation so our whole podcast is called how
Speaker 1: to Citizen, and the premises that we all have a
Speaker 1: role to play in shaping our society's the whole self
Speaker 1: government thing. We believe in it were nerds for that reason.
Speaker 1: I'm curious what you've learned about human behavior and decision
Speaker 1: making in digital spaces that can make it hard for
Speaker 1: us to self govern and participate in our society. You know,
Speaker 1: I think one of the lessons that I've learned at
Speaker 1: a basic level people to have a motivation to be accurate.
Speaker 1: We do want to know what's going on in the world.
Speaker 1: For most people, that's kind of a default baseline. But
Speaker 1: then when you're put in situations that's basically thwart that
Speaker 1: internal sort of radar that you have, things can get
Speaker 1: pretty ugly. What happens when you go on social media
Speaker 1: is that there's all sorts of different incentives that appeal
Speaker 1: to people that have nothing to do with accuracy. What
Speaker 1: are other powerful forces that influence our decision making? You
Speaker 1: go online, you see some things that's not only been
Speaker 1: shared by somebody you trust and know. That type of
Speaker 1: information gets priority from people because we use it as
Speaker 1: a heuristic. If information comes from somebody already know and
Speaker 1: trust there's an implicit assumption that's been vetted and verified
Speaker 1: by that person and they wouldn't share anything to do people.
Speaker 1: But now it also has a thousand likes, it's been
Speaker 1: shared fifty thousand times. That's a powerful indicator something important
Speaker 1: is going on that you might want to share it
Speaker 1: as well. And then there's the filter. So Facebook is
Speaker 1: filtering things based on your prior click behavior and things
Speaker 1: that you've looked at. And then you know, you're focused
Speaker 1: with making a decision. What are you sharing online? What
Speaker 1: are you paying attention to? You know, In one study,
Speaker 1: will looked at millions and millions of posts on Twitter
Speaker 1: and Facebook and what's the stuff that generates the most engagement.
Speaker 1: It's posts that derogate the out group. So if you're
Speaker 1: a liberal, the outgroup is a conservative. If you're conservative,
Speaker 1: the outgroup is a liberal. And so we coded posts
Speaker 1: for whether it was you know, positive or negative and
Speaker 1: about liberals or conservatives, And across millions of posts, the
Speaker 1: number one thing that got the most tractions is basically
Speaker 1: trash talk about the other group. That is what it
Speaker 1: gets engagement on social media. So when you come in
Speaker 1: all accuracy motivated it and call them and honest, and
Speaker 1: you get distracted by this incentive to start hating on people,
Speaker 1: essentially because that's what's it you like, So that's what
Speaker 1: gets promoted, that's what gets shared, that's what's the norm
Speaker 1: on the platform. Then that's what influences your judgments and
Speaker 1: behaviors much more so than other facts. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like you're back in high school when you're on social media.
Speaker 1: That social pressure is back, you know, and how do
Speaker 1: we fix that is a big problem, and so we
Speaker 1: certainly have some ideas. Whether or not social companies are
Speaker 1: keen on them is another and I should say that
Speaker 1: I do advise social media companies. Part of what they're
Speaker 1: doing is on a micro level, they're trying to find misinformation,
Speaker 1: they're trying to get fact checkers on board. They helped
Speaker 1: them on how to debunk misinformation more effectively on their platform,
Speaker 1: and these are kind of micro solutions. Right, there's a problem.
Speaker 1: They try to fix it by getting more facts out there,
Speaker 1: by you know, upgrading the way that they correct misinformation
Speaker 1: on on their plat form. But at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, I think what they're not thinking about is
Speaker 1: that if you really want to change the incentives that
Speaker 1: people face on social media. You're gonna have to rethink
Speaker 1: the whole nature of the platform. What we want to
Speaker 1: envision is a place where people have a motivation to
Speaker 1: be accurate, to share factual information, to have constructive conversations,
Speaker 1: to have positive conversations. The other thing that they'll say,
Speaker 1: and I think this is very interesting to me, is
Speaker 1: that we didn't design this platform to help people be
Speaker 1: as accurate as they can be. That's not the purpose
Speaker 1: of social media. We're not. They admit that, I admit
Speaker 1: that we're not. We're not interested in getting everyone to
Speaker 1: have the you know, scientific opinions and the truth driven.
Speaker 1: We're not in the truth business. And they want people
Speaker 1: to have fun, they have the conversations that they want
Speaker 1: to have, even if they're they're spicy, and will admit
Speaker 1: and say, look, that's not our purpose. Our purposes to
Speaker 1: let people have all kinds of conversations, and we're not
Speaker 1: we're not going to regulate necessarily what people say. I
Speaker 1: think that's the issue. I think maybe to enhance a
Speaker 1: better environment for everyone on social media, we have to
Speaker 1: just fundamentally change the incentives, which means you're not going
Speaker 1: to get as much engagement, and that's a difficult that's
Speaker 1: a difficult ask if you really want to fix this problem,
Speaker 1: we're gonna have less engagement means you're gonna make it.
Speaker 1: Less money means we're gonna have a different kinds of incentives.
Speaker 1: And I think that's just not a business decision they're
Speaker 1: willing to make. When we come back, Sander and I
Speaker 1: get into how playing games can enhance democracy. You can
Speaker 1: do both at the same time. It's dope. Talk to
Speaker 1: me about how someone engages in spreading wildly inaccurate information.
Speaker 1: I'm one of these platforms. I'm talking microchips in my
Speaker 1: maderna shot, I'm talking five G towers pumping out COVID,
Speaker 1: even things that are counter factual to observed reality fly around.
Speaker 1: What is the psychology of that kind of spread? Why
Speaker 1: do people keep sharing it? Yeah? Why why do people
Speaker 1: keep sharing it? One theory is kind of what I
Speaker 1: call more of a generous take on the human decision
Speaker 1: making condition that we find ourselves in. Right, It's called
Speaker 1: the inattention account. If you think of the brain as
Speaker 1: a computer being bombarded with information, and so our memories
Speaker 1: are limited and our attention spans limited, you know, there's
Speaker 1: too much going on and we're getting distracted. If only
Speaker 1: there was a way to bring accurate information to your attention,
Speaker 1: then the problem would be solved. Overwhelmed human is the
Speaker 1: charitable interpretation. What's the other one? The other account is
Speaker 1: a bit more nefarious, right. It's suggests that people are
Speaker 1: actively biased, and that we share content because we want
Speaker 1: to promote or identify with the kind of social groups
Speaker 1: that we belong to. We have a political identity that
Speaker 1: we want to make salient to people. It might be
Speaker 1: the case that you share content not because you really
Speaker 1: believe it. It's not that you're you don't believe climate
Speaker 1: change or you don't believe in the vaccine. You're sharing
Speaker 1: it because it reinforces the narrative of your group. It
Speaker 1: makes the connections that you have with other people you
Speaker 1: care about stronger. It helps you give you a sense
Speaker 1: of purpose and agency and that you're belonging to a
Speaker 1: movement um thinking about Q and on, for example, and
Speaker 1: so it reinforces what we call a sense of social identities.
Speaker 1: What you're describing sounds like gang colors and membership. You're
Speaker 1: literally signaling your membership and the facts or lack thereof
Speaker 1: don't matter nearly as much as you wave in that color.
Speaker 1: It's very understandable, and I think I can even see
Speaker 1: it from my own experience with this whole idea of
Speaker 1: like when I see an article that confirms me, I'm like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's why am I knew Big Evil Corp? Was big
Speaker 1: and evil? Then I'll share the hell out of that.
Speaker 1: But then if I see some like wonderfully written defense
Speaker 1: of like well why globalization has actually been on net part,
Speaker 1: I'm like, whatever, that's be as somebody made that up.
Speaker 1: That's this information because I don't even I actually don't
Speaker 1: want to believe it because it challenges me, not intellectually,
Speaker 1: but like identificationally or something like I don't I already
Speaker 1: know who I am. I don't want to be someone different.
Speaker 1: I've invested a lot in this identity, so I'm not
Speaker 1: going to share something that challenges me. Then you just add,
Speaker 1: you know, fuel to that fire when you put it
Speaker 1: on a technology platform that has a financial incentive to
Speaker 1: turn up those dials and hit both explanations of why
Speaker 1: we do what we do. So you have this concept
Speaker 1: of pre bunking that I find fascinating. Can you explain it? Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: Pre Bunking is the idea that rather than trying to
Speaker 1: correct something after a fact, which was usually called debunking,
Speaker 1: it's that you try to do it preemptively. M hmm.
Speaker 1: But the idea here it goes further. It follows the
Speaker 1: biomedical vaccination metaphor exactly. So, just as you inject people
Speaker 1: with the weakened dose of the virus to trigger at
Speaker 1: the production of antibodies and an attempt to help confer
Speaker 1: immunity against future infection, turns out you can do the
Speaker 1: same with misinformation. When you expose people to severely and
Speaker 1: sufficiently weakened dose of the misinformation virus quote unquote or
Speaker 1: the techniques that are used to spread misinformation, people can
Speaker 1: build up cognitive or intellectual antibodies against them and become
Speaker 1: more resistant. So we should at prebunk when it's possible.
Speaker 1: You know, viruses have different incubation periods, misinformation pathogens have
Speaker 1: different periods, and in the sense that even when you've
Speaker 1: already been exposed, it can still be beneficial, but at
Speaker 1: some point it's going to be too late. But pretty
Speaker 1: bunk when you can yeah, that doesn't work. We can
Speaker 1: do fact checking in real time and if it doesn't work.
Speaker 1: We can still try to debunk and correct things after
Speaker 1: the fact. I guess we haven't really talked about why
Speaker 1: that's less effective. It very brief. It's less effective because
Speaker 1: once you're exposed to a falsehood, it sits in your memory.
Speaker 1: It makes friends with all the things you know. And
Speaker 1: so we know from research and when people acknowledge a correction,
Speaker 1: even when they acknowledge it, they continue to retrieve false
Speaker 1: details from memory about the event. And I think it's
Speaker 1: something very basic. If I don't know, I don't know
Speaker 1: where you live, but if I told you that down
Speaker 1: your street and went to one of the restaurants, and
Speaker 1: you know, I got food poisoning was real bad. A
Speaker 1: week later, I tell you, oh, look listen, actually it
Speaker 1: wasn't that restaurant, it was another one. Every time you're
Speaker 1: going to pass by that restaurant, you've gotta think food poisoning.
Speaker 1: That's a difficult thing with corrections. It lingers in your
Speaker 1: mind because this association has been made. And that's why
Speaker 1: pre bunking is ideal. How did this idea emerge? Can
Speaker 1: you put me in the room or the zone that
Speaker 1: you or your team or wherever this idea came from.
Speaker 1: How did it emerge? Yeah, well, I actually can tell
Speaker 1: you that there was a psychologist in the sixties this
Speaker 1: psychological warfare, or at least it's one place. His name
Speaker 1: is Bill McGuire. He's no longer alive. Psychological warfare. He
Speaker 1: developed some articles, very early articles, and something he called
Speaker 1: the inoculation theory, which at the time was following the
Speaker 1: biomedical iganization metaphor, but the use of this force as
Speaker 1: an integral popular combat has now taken on new forms.
Speaker 1: He was concerned during the Korean War. You know that
Speaker 1: some of the prisoners award and there was a whole
Speaker 1: paranoia about them being brainwashed at the time. Now we
Speaker 1: know that there's other explanations for why some of these
Speaker 1: soldiers voluntarily didn't choose to come back to the United States.
Speaker 1: One example was racism, but at the time the predominant
Speaker 1: narrative was that these soldiers were brainwashed. Here also, it
Speaker 1: was a chance to see directly into the communist state
Speaker 1: through the eyes of typical, average young American, and so
Speaker 1: McGuire was thinking, well, is it possible to develop this
Speaker 1: is the vaccine for brainwash? You know, how how would
Speaker 1: you do that? The kind of key solution at the
Speaker 1: time was the military and the White House stuff. They
Speaker 1: were saying, Oh, the problem is American values aren't clear
Speaker 1: enough to the people, And McGuire said, that's actually not
Speaker 1: the issue. The issue is that the soldiers were not
Speaker 1: prepared for the type of manipulation strategies that they would
Speaker 1: be confronted with because the Chinese camps at the time,
Speaker 1: they weren't violent necessarily, they said, welcome to the other side. Here,
Speaker 1: we're going to educate you about what's really going on
Speaker 1: with communism. It's not some evil thing, and we're not
Speaker 1: going to necessarily harm you. We just want to re
Speaker 1: educate you. That presented a lot of counter arguments to capitalism.
Speaker 1: They had daily lectures and classes, and so what I
Speaker 1: think what McGuire was trying to say was that they
Speaker 1: really hadn't anticipated in an attack on the foundations of capitalism,
Speaker 1: and a lot of them started they had no prior
Speaker 1: defenses against They just assumed capitalism is good. They were
Speaker 1: prepared for a war of military arms and weapons. They
Speaker 1: were not prepared for a war of information ship exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you never got to the propaganda, the misinformation. He kind
Speaker 1: of left this idea moved on to all other ideas.
Speaker 1: It got buried for sixty years. So I was sitting
Speaker 1: in the library one day and I came across one
Speaker 1: of his articles and I was like, Wow, this is
Speaker 1: gonna be so if we could develop this idea further
Speaker 1: now in this context, is going to be so interesting.
Speaker 1: So we kind of picked up where he left off
Speaker 1: and started actually testing this in the context of misinformation,
Speaker 1: and we thought, how could we bring this into the
Speaker 1: twenty one century. And one of the things we did
Speaker 1: is we started simulating a social media feed in a
Speaker 1: in a kind of simulator machine together with gaming a
Speaker 1: company and a Vida literacy company that we teamed up
Speaker 1: with and a bunch of programmers, big team, and then
Speaker 1: we decided to produce some real world interventions where people
Speaker 1: can enter what we called the disinformation Simulator that would
Speaker 1: be exposed to these weakend doses of the key techniques
Speaker 1: that are being used to deceive us online. And then
Speaker 1: we found that over time people can build up, you know, immunity.
Speaker 1: This is so so perfect because simulations are used in
Speaker 1: trainings of all kinds. You know, pilots have flight simulators
Speaker 1: and you know, infantry have the first person shooters simulator,
Speaker 1: and we use games to teach. So you built this simulator,
Speaker 1: this game to extend McGuire's thinking about inoculation theory into
Speaker 1: a more modern day practice, not against you know, Chinese
Speaker 1: political propaganda, but against social media distributed propaganda. What a
Speaker 1: fascinating path from the sixties to now. One of the
Speaker 1: quotes that I've pulled out during this process was from
Speaker 1: Harry Potter Books professor Several Snake, who said, we want
Speaker 1: to find the dark arts, then our defenses must be
Speaker 1: as flexible and inventive as the arts that we seek
Speaker 1: to undo. And I think our our common realization was
Speaker 1: the dark arts of manipulation are evolving sciences as ayn
Speaker 1: factor for a lot of people. We got to go
Speaker 1: out of the lab produce some things that are entertaining
Speaker 1: and fun for people so that we can actually get
Speaker 1: this out and test it in the real world and
Speaker 1: make it fun and entertaining and not you know, so
Speaker 1: people don't get the feeling that they're attending a lecture,
Speaker 1: but they're actually playing a part and generating their own antibodies.
Speaker 1: I've played the game that you and your team have
Speaker 1: created that's built around this inoculation theory, and I gotta
Speaker 1: tell you, I'm very impressed. Like it revealed. It was
Speaker 1: like lifting a veil on the matrix. I was like, oh,
Speaker 1: that's how this works. Oh, I was invested in creating disinformation.
Speaker 1: You kind of you simulated me as a chaos monkey,
Speaker 1: as an agent of chaos visited upon this fictional place.
Speaker 1: Can you explain the game Harmony Square and how it
Speaker 1: works to put into practice this inoculation theory we've been
Speaker 1: talking about, Yeah, you know, it's great. So we have
Speaker 1: a couple of interventions, and Harmony Square was one that
Speaker 1: focused on disinformation during elections and political sort of disinformation.
Speaker 1: We also have bad News, which is our general simulator,
Speaker 1: which is not specific to a particular domain. It's a
Speaker 1: sort of very broad. But Harmony Square came about and
Speaker 1: because there was an interest in inoculating people against foreign
Speaker 1: influence techniques that are being used to medal with democracies
Speaker 1: and elections and of course such a big topic that
Speaker 1: we wanted to do a specialized version of some of
Speaker 1: the more general simulators that we've build. Congratulations, you are
Speaker 1: hired and welcome to your first day as our new
Speaker 1: Chief Disinformation Office. Harmony Square is a green and pleasant place.
Speaker 1: It's famous for its living statue, it's majestic Point Swap
Speaker 1: and it's a new Pineacle Peaks festival. We talked that
Speaker 1: basic idea of Harmony Square, which is the last democracy
Speaker 1: on Earth at Depressing. That's there you enter into a
Speaker 1: peaceful town. The contents all fictional, and it's supposed to
Speaker 1: be a bit ludicrous, right that there's this fictional town
Speaker 1: and something very innocuous happens. Using that kind of narrative,
Speaker 1: we try to inoculate people against some of these techniques
Speaker 1: that are used to polarize people. M hm m m. Yeah.
Speaker 1: If you goes here an illusionist or a magic show
Speaker 1: the first time, you might be duped. And there's really
Speaker 1: two ways to fix that. Once I'm going to give
Speaker 1: you a blueprint of how the trick works, which is
Speaker 1: kind of like a factual sort of treatment. Or I
Speaker 1: could let you step into the shoes of the illusionist
Speaker 1: for a little while so you can discover the trick
Speaker 1: on your own, and that way you're never going to
Speaker 1: be duped by it again. Chaos is what counts. Let's
Speaker 1: create another alter ego account and pretend to we're on
Speaker 1: the other side of this fight. I am totally ramped up.
Speaker 1: I am invested in this egg. On the other side
Speaker 1: as well, Oh, we're definitely using bots deploy the bots.
Speaker 1: I love that. Man. When I tell you like I
Speaker 1: enjoyed it. You made me into a monster and I
Speaker 1: loved it. That's that's how effective the game was. I
Speaker 1: played a lot of games I've overseen, like hackathons with
Speaker 1: creative activists and comedians and stuff before, so I thought
Speaker 1: I knew what I was getting into. And by the end,
Speaker 1: I was like, I'm going to destroy this town, like
Speaker 1: we won't even remember it existed. And so you have
Speaker 1: insensivized really devastating behavior. I was rewarded for it. You
Speaker 1: track the amount of followers you get after each wave
Speaker 1: of these campaigns and do you want to escalate or
Speaker 1: go home? Definitely want to escalate, right. So I look
Speaker 1: back after this and I'm like, oh, man, can you
Speaker 1: connect the dots from this game back to the real world?
Speaker 1: And how an experience like this, whether it's this game
Speaker 1: or some of your other projects, helps me interface with
Speaker 1: and process my actual social media feed better. How are
Speaker 1: my defenses more activated against the real life misinformation and disinformation? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Absolutely so? As you said, there's a bit of a
Speaker 1: shock value to the game, because precisely, one of the
Speaker 1: core elements of inoculation theory is that people need to
Speaker 1: experience a sense of threat to motivate themselves to want
Speaker 1: to defend themselves against misinformation attacks. We need to activate
Speaker 1: your antibody production, and so we need to get people,
Speaker 1: you know, into the mode. And as you said, of
Speaker 1: their elections going on during the game, and there's a
Speaker 1: newscaster and you can see the approval ratings live and
Speaker 1: as you cast your chaos, they're they're affected. And there's
Speaker 1: this candidate and you have a Samarican pain about them.
Speaker 1: How are you going to ruin? Actually plugs unopposed, run
Speaker 1: message family and friends, or create a fake news site.
Speaker 1: All right, here's another option, Ashley plugs disgusting chat messages leaked.
Speaker 1: I'm bleeping hate bears. This is the kind of chaos.
Speaker 1: We need to post this and then oh, it's like
Speaker 1: a sloth photo. What the words please, it's meant to
Speaker 1: be a bit amusing. What we do at the end
Speaker 1: of all of our interventions is we evaluated empirically, so
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the game, and I'm not sure
Speaker 1: if you participated in I did. I did everything I
Speaker 1: was asked to do. We give people some stimulated social
Speaker 1: media headlines, and we asked them how reliable they think
Speaker 1: that are, how confident they are un their judgment, but
Speaker 1: they would share it on social media and things like that.
Speaker 1: And the types of headlines that we give kind of
Speaker 1: reflect what's going down social media. So I'll give you
Speaker 1: an example. Basically as people protesting saying and Father's Day
Speaker 1: and other people you know and so and so. It's
Speaker 1: this it is an issue that's getting blown up, potentially
Speaker 1: by by nefarious actors because they wanted to sow divisions,
Speaker 1: and so we want to know, I have people become
Speaker 1: more tuned to this strategy of of for example, in
Speaker 1: this case polarization. Another was a news article tweet about
Speaker 1: a news article that I think it was a father
Speaker 1: and his and his son and they went out hunting
Speaker 1: and shot themselves or something, and so many commented, oh,
Speaker 1: one point five magabilities less in the world. It's this
Speaker 1: type of deeply polarizing sort of debate that we wanted
Speaker 1: to address. And what we found is that people are
Speaker 1: better able to recognize these strategies in the sense that
Speaker 1: they found these posts less reliable. After playing a game,
Speaker 1: they're less likely to say that they'll share this type
Speaker 1: of content on social media once people leave the game.
Speaker 1: We've we started to follow up with them a week
Speaker 1: after week and don't worry, we get ethics approval from
Speaker 1: this from the university. But we we sort of attacked
Speaker 1: people with misinformation week week after week, and so at
Speaker 1: tax House nefarious. But we basically present people with social
Speaker 1: media posts that are misinformation and we ask you know,
Speaker 1: the same questions. And what we found is that actually
Speaker 1: for a psychological vaccine, it lasts pretty long, for about
Speaker 1: two months. The antibodies are still there, you know, after
Speaker 1: two months. It helps when you boost people in between.
Speaker 1: So we found that there's a decay like what the
Speaker 1: Fiser vaccine, and you need a booster otherwise it wears off.
Speaker 1: There's too many distracts we call interference going on in
Speaker 1: the world that makes people forget and get less motivated.
Speaker 1: But you can boost people in between by re engaging them.
Speaker 1: One of our interventions the bad News, which is the
Speaker 1: sort of the main simulator when viral on Reddit, and
Speaker 1: they can actually crashed our service, so they call it
Speaker 1: the Reddit Hug of Death. The Red Hug of Death.
Speaker 1: Yet we started, like, we started scraping what the redditors
Speaker 1: were talking about, for example, and it was really interesting
Speaker 1: to learn about, you know, people sharing their experience about
Speaker 1: the game and what they've learned, and they started getting
Speaker 1: us thinking about her immunity. And wait, maybe maybe people
Speaker 1: are airing the inoculation with each other on social media,
Speaker 1: And wouldn't that be cool that if people talked about
Speaker 1: what they've learned share with others, so that even people
Speaker 1: who didn't directly play the game can benefit from the
Speaker 1: vaccine sort of speak. And so that's kind of what
Speaker 1: we're working on now. So I played one of your games,
Speaker 1: and I'm a good person, Sander. I am open minded.
Speaker 1: I vote for the right people. But there's other people
Speaker 1: out there, Sander, who are not the best, and they
Speaker 1: spread lies and deceptive information all the time. Are they
Speaker 1: playing your game? To Sander? Is the other side playing
Speaker 1: this game? Are my Q and on brethren playing in
Speaker 1: your game? Well? It's interesting. I don't think that die
Speaker 1: hard conspiracy theorists are playing our game, but we aren't
Speaker 1: thinking about some ways of trying to reach a broader
Speaker 1: audience in terms of the inoculation and getting it, you know,
Speaker 1: getting it scaled to people who might not voluntarily, who
Speaker 1: might not volunteer to come in and sort of learn
Speaker 1: more about this stuff. The epidemiological metaphor of vaccination and
Speaker 1: inoculation is so clear as a strength to me, but
Speaker 1: it's something that has some limits. So we're in a
Speaker 1: real epidemiological challenge right now with COVID nineteen and vaccines
Speaker 1: are a tool, but they're not the only tool, right
Speaker 1: and with any infectious disease, we don't just rely on
Speaker 1: people to inoculate themselves against the threat. We have public
Speaker 1: health agencies, we have government policies, companies institute barriers. So yeah,
Speaker 1: big question, but simplified, what else can we do if
Speaker 1: not every person on Earth plays your game to still
Speaker 1: get a handle on the misinformation disinformation challenge? I think
Speaker 1: the uncomfortable spot that we're all in, especially as a scientist,
Speaker 1: is that it seems unrealistic. What else can we do
Speaker 1: that they're willing to accept? And for us, YouTube actually
Speaker 1: doesn't work directly with outside scientists. It's actually it's it's
Speaker 1: very difficult to implement an evidence based sort of freebunk
Speaker 1: on their platform. So I gottapplause you there earlier in
Speaker 1: our conversation, you um acknowledge, and you know, these platforms acknowledge.
Speaker 1: They're not in the business of accuracy or truth right there,
Speaker 1: in the business of engagement, their business of entertaining conversation,
Speaker 1: probably user growth. But you just said about YouTube doesn't
Speaker 1: work with outside researchers directly, that sounds to me like
Speaker 1: they don't want to know the truth. They're actively avoiding
Speaker 1: understanding the impact of their platforms on us. What's your
Speaker 1: read on that decision. I think there's probably some truth
Speaker 1: to that. Probably doesn't only apply to YouTube, but to
Speaker 1: most social media companies, because the fact of the matter
Speaker 1: is we can say what we want to them, and
Speaker 1: we say a lot to them, and we have meetings
Speaker 1: with them regularly, and they listen to us, and they
Speaker 1: do respect to us, and and they take our evidence.
Speaker 1: But you know, they say they have their own internal
Speaker 1: evidence that they don't always want people to extract to
Speaker 1: ee weight externally. So what can we say. It's like, okay,
Speaker 1: the way they hold on they have their own facts,
Speaker 1: they have their they have alternative facts, they have their
Speaker 1: own alternative facts. This is terrible, but it's tricky, you know,
Speaker 1: because they say, oh, in your experiment, you're just simulating Facebook.
Speaker 1: We can actually see what's happening on Facebook, and it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: but if you don't want to share it, then we're
Speaker 1: not getting anywhere. But we have very little information about
Speaker 1: what is actually going on in these platforms the studies
Speaker 1: that we do from social media because we get limited
Speaker 1: access to scrape millions of posts, but it's it's only
Speaker 1: a snapshot really of what's what's going on. And they're
Speaker 1: very hesitant to work with scientists and needs a long
Speaker 1: time to build up relationships. We're getting there, but it's difficult.
Speaker 1: I just want to say, agree with you. To us,
Speaker 1: it seems like a win where you can get them
Speaker 1: to implement an evidence based solution, even if it's a
Speaker 1: minor one. And I will say the people that we
Speaker 1: work with and the research teams at these companies there
Speaker 1: are really motivated and they really want to fix the problems.
Speaker 1: I think the issue is with the high level policy
Speaker 1: executive people who just shoot down the sort of more
Speaker 1: artical and solutions that we need. I think that the
Speaker 1: problem is with the people a higher up, not necessarily
Speaker 1: the research teams or we're going out making connections with
Speaker 1: researchers reading our papers, wanting to fund our research, want
Speaker 1: to implement a solutions, and then they go to their
Speaker 1: bosses and they say, interesting, we'll think a much. We'll
Speaker 1: look congratulations for having any level of dialogue and partnership
Speaker 1: with these large organizations. So we're going in the right direction.
Speaker 1: Whether we're going far enough, fast enough, we should argue
Speaker 1: about that. On social media, I'd love to know how
Speaker 1: you think about the impact you've had, whether it's in
Speaker 1: the partnership world with these companies, whether it's working with governments,
Speaker 1: or whether it's just you know, individuals from a Reddit
Speaker 1: or some other social share coming across some of these games.
Speaker 1: I mean with Facebook weekly, I take time, you know,
Speaker 1: how did my schedule every week to try to Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's incredible. How much furniture do you throw during
Speaker 1: these well, you know, and it is and and there.
Speaker 1: The team is really good, but the decisions that are
Speaker 1: ultimately made it's slow, and it's very slow process. But
Speaker 1: we're making progress. But no, it's not. It's not going
Speaker 1: fast enough. We need more radical changes in solutions. We
Speaker 1: we try to team up with the organizations that are
Speaker 1: impactful in the area that we're working, whether it's a
Speaker 1: Department of Homeland Security who can distribute this to all
Speaker 1: political parties and so on, or with our COVID nineteen
Speaker 1: game called go Viral. We got some support from the
Speaker 1: World Health Organization and the United Nations, and you know,
Speaker 1: they have volunteers that can target this intervention at vulnerable
Speaker 1: audiences and really help scale it across millions of people.
Speaker 1: But there's billions of people in the world, not just millions.
Speaker 1: So I think, what can people do? Here's my general
Speaker 1: philosophy for society. I think we need a firewall system
Speaker 1: to mitigate the post truth sort of biased that's that's
Speaker 1: creeping in. And so this firewall system, or a multi
Speaker 1: layer defense system should start with the pre bunking. So
Speaker 1: we should all prebunk the w HL, the social media companies,
Speaker 1: even regular companies. And then at the same time we
Speaker 1: have to radically reinvent the incentive structure of social media.
Speaker 1: So nothing big, nothing big that I'm floating here, that's all.
Speaker 1: That's all. So so we call this show how to Citizen.
Speaker 1: Whe We think of citizen as a verb, not a
Speaker 1: noun or legal status, so much as a posture of
Speaker 1: participation in society. What's your view on what citizening means
Speaker 1: to you. I think being a good citizen means not
Speaker 1: only maintaining a healthy information diet or yourself, but also
Speaker 1: helping other people to discertain fact from fiction in their lives.
Speaker 1: And I think that's how I see morale, is that
Speaker 1: it's not just about me, it's also about helping my
Speaker 1: fellow citizen not get duped. This is a refreshing take
Speaker 1: on a challenge that so many of us just feel
Speaker 1: hopeless about. So thank you for another perspective on that.
Speaker 1: I'm excited that you've built something that's fun and terrifyingly
Speaker 1: effective at the same time. That's hard trick to pull off,
Speaker 1: So thank you, Sander for the time. I look forward
Speaker 1: to a more sane and healthy information environment for us
Speaker 1: all to have it. Thanks so much for having me on.
Speaker 1: We've all been there. I know I have. Just kicking
Speaker 1: it on the Internet and some jerk shows up spreading infuriating,
Speaker 1: lee incorrect garbage. So we do what any good citizen
Speaker 1: is supposed to do. We dump data, we fire all facts.
Speaker 1: We counter that misinformation with real information to prove that
Speaker 1: jerk wrong. But Sander wants us to reimagine and reframe
Speaker 1: the way we approach misinformation. We can't hit people over
Speaker 1: the head with facts. Whack a mole is in a
Speaker 1: active games like harmony Square. On the other hand, they
Speaker 1: teach us some of the dark arts of misdirection and illusion,
Speaker 1: and like peeking behind the curtain and seeing the great
Speaker 1: and powerful odds for the first time. Once you see
Speaker 1: him and his dirty bag of tricks, he loses some
Speaker 1: of his power. So stay safe, stay alert. Think twice
Speaker 1: before you hit that share button, but honestly, think also
Speaker 1: about who even wants you to hit the button in
Speaker 1: the first place, and what they have to gain from it.
Speaker 1: As we check in with ourselves about the content we consume.
Speaker 1: Next time, we get a lesson on tech nutrition, because
Speaker 1: machines gotta eat too. Bias in, bias out like garbage in,
Speaker 1: garbage out. You feed this machine something, the machine is
Speaker 1: going to look exactly like what you fed it. You
Speaker 1: are what you eat. By now you know we're committed
Speaker 1: to giving you things to do beyond listening to our episodes.
Speaker 1: And I knew how the citizen dot com website, we've
Speaker 1: got every episode transcripts, links to the guests, but most importantly,
Speaker 1: we have things you can do to actually practice citizening.
Speaker 1: So in that spirit, for this episode, here's some things
Speaker 1: you can do. Point your browser over to inoculation dot science.
Speaker 1: That's right, there's a dot science domain name. Get your
Speaker 1: science on. Head on over to an oculation dot science
Speaker 1: one end, and play the set of games that they've built.
Speaker 1: In addition to breaking Harmony Square, which you heard me
Speaker 1: playing and acting the damn fool as I did, so,
Speaker 1: they've got games to help you limit the harm of
Speaker 1: fake news and COVID misinformation. After you've played some of
Speaker 1: the games and watch some of the videos, reflect on
Speaker 1: how they made you feel. Are there online experiences you've
Speaker 1: had that make more sense once you consider you might
Speaker 1: have been intentionally manipulated. How does that feel? I suspect
Speaker 1: it makes you mad, but also it might make you
Speaker 1: feel more empowered. And do you think these games might
Speaker 1: affect how you engage online in the future. Finally, share
Speaker 1: these games with the people you care about. So many
Speaker 1: of us have folks in our lives, and we don't
Speaker 1: want to waste hours and hours convincing them of something
Speaker 1: that's so obviously false when we take real information into account. Look,
Speaker 1: friends don't let friends spread misinformation. It's kind of as
Speaker 1: simple as that. I don't expect you to memorize all this.
Speaker 1: Everything I've said is a version of it in the
Speaker 1: show notes, in the podcast app you're listening on right now,
Speaker 1: and we've got all these links over at how to
Speaker 1: citizen dot com. You can also engage with us on
Speaker 1: I G on Zuckerberg's property. We are at how to
Speaker 1: Citizen where you can share and learn from other people
Speaker 1: who own this journey with us, including me. That's all
Speaker 1: I got for now. Peace. How to Citizen with Barriton
Speaker 1: Day is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts and
Speaker 1: dust Light Productions. Are Ecutive producers are Me Barry to
Speaker 1: Day Thurston, Elizabeth Stewart, and Misha Usa. Our senior producer
Speaker 1: is Tamika Adams, our producer is Ali Kilts, and our
Speaker 1: assistant producer is Sam Paulson. Stephanie Cohne is our editor,
Speaker 1: Valentino Rivera is our senior engineer, and Matthew Lai as
Speaker 1: our apprentice. Special thanks to Sam Paulson for creating the
Speaker 1: chip tune arrangement of the how the Citizen theme and
Speaker 1: the Harmony Square inspired tunes to accompany my game play.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced in sound designed by Tamika Adams
Speaker 1: with additional help from Sam Paulson. Additional production help from
Speaker 1: Arwin Knicks. Special thanks to Joel Smith from my Heart
Speaker 1: Radio and Rachel Garcia at Dusklight Productions.