Defending Our Collective Psyche (with Sander van der Linden)

Let's get started. We hired you two, So discord and chaos on Harmony Square. That's what's up. That's what I'm here for. Who are we about to flog up? So right now I'm playing Harmony Square. Normally this game doesn't have music or sound, but my team took some creative liberties to bring you into the experience with me, and clearly I'm having way too much fun about to sew some chaos. Harmony Square is a green and pleasant place. It's famous for its living statue, it's majestic Palm Swan,

and its annual pineapple Pizza festival. Any place that does a pineapple pizza festival deserves some discord. Yeah, pineapple pizza that's disgusted. Now, the goal of this game is to disturb this hypothetical quaint small towns piece and quiet by fomenting internal divisions and pitting its residence against each other. I am oddly excited about the prospect. There are no bears here, never have been. But how many Square loves

elections so much they keep voting for a bear patroller? Anyway, one of the ways you get to divide this absurd little town is through an election. It's for bear patrollers, and there's only one candidate, Ashley Plute. What kind of language do you think is most likely to ruin the bear patroller election? Tears and fears or facts and logic

tears and fears. So as I'm going through the game, I'm getting presented with these choices for how I intervene, and I got real excited about the chance to make fake news means. Since you're so clever, why don't you choose some electrifying buzzwords to including your mean. I get to pick three buzzwords, O, corrupt, abuse, and lie. Yeah, we're taking Plute down. Now you can put together an

emotionally abusive meaning. So I decided to go with this meet it shows that too white dudes handshaking above the table, but underneath, money's changing hands unopposed. It's just a fancy word for corrupt. Careful though you posted some content that wasn't emotionally exploitative cost you a couple of lives, the megaphone will be much more successful if you use the right buzzwords. Damn alright, coach, Yeah, this is mad devious, like this is This is by far the best thing

I've seen that explains this. Like, I'm bright, Bart, you know this is wonderful, and by wonderful I mean terrible. This is a really twisted game because I thought I was playing it aggressively by choosing to disparage a newscaster on a small scale, you know, talking trash to a friend or a family member. It turns out the game is like, that's not devious enough. You must scale your deception, and so it encouraged me to kind of create a

more public platform for the disinformation. Hell with responsibility. That's crack it up to eleven. I'm trying to destroy the time. Like this game has really got me. Why they even call it harmony square? I think that's what bothers me. I want to make it Discord Square. Let's go. Can we get some tiny violin music up in here? You did it. You ruined the biggest moment in Harmony squares history.

They're all at each other's throats now, okay, in the end, let's see, still counting, you have reached fifty six thousand four followers. You did better than eight of the people who knew simulating the emotional destruction of a small town could be so much fun and that I'd be so good at it. I mean, it's fun, but it's also scary. Now.

Harmony Square is a fictional place obsessed with democracy electing bear patrollers, But other than the bear patrol thing, it's pretty similar to the world we live in right now. The election has cast a light on misinformation online, and it's fust election stories from foak sites and dangers of fake news. Ever since the presidential election, our internet has become increasingly more divisive, with fake news spreading like wildfire.

And combating all this misinformation that can feel like you're playing whack a mole. You take one down, three more pop up, but in this case, millions more pop up, whether it's misleading headlines, divisive memes, or trolls and these little rodents they're borrowing into the fabric of our society. It's kind of maddening and admittedly disgusting with the whole

rodent metaphor. After a few years into this fake news ecosystem, social scientists are seeing how easily we can fall prey to some of our basest human instincts, and fear is a hell of a drug and a terrible motivator. As we click, shape, air, and retweet about the pandemic racial injustice, climate change, and more, many of us have become aware of how deep and dark the pit of social media can be, but few of us have had the chance to drive that descent like I got to do in

the fake world of Harmony Square. But Harmony Square isn't just reflecting real world problems in a cute way. It's helping us battle them too. Yes, a game can help us fight misinformation and disinformation. Believe it or not, this game was preparing me to fight off trolls by getting inside their heads. In other words, it's like a fake news vaccine. Sander vander Linden is one of the people

behind Harmony Square. He's a professor of psychology, at the University of Cambridge, studying how people are influenced by social media and misinformation. His team of researchers have partnered with game developers to create several games just like Harmony Square. They called themselves Get This Bad News Games. Essentially, these are choose your own adventure games, all free to play online, and there are a real way that science can go out and reach people. But even he admits it's an

ongoing struggle. If I told you that down your street and went to one of the restaurants, and you know, I got food poisoning was real bad. A week later, I tell you, oh, look listen, actually it wasn't that restaurant, it was another one. Every time you're going to pass by that restaurant, you've gotta thank food poisoning. After the break, sanders prescription for our social media ills and a lesson in Dutch salutations, what's up, Sander, Welcome to how to

Citizen Pleasure to be on the show Dog. That's close. That's close. Yeah, correct, my terrible Dutch with the proper pronunciation hudnd Okay, Wow, that's good. That's good. Yeah. Yeah, there's a you know, people say, oh, you know, Dutch and Germans pretty much the same, but but we feel strongly that there's a nuance nuance difference there. Your field of specialty is timely and it's fascinating about human decision making and influence and judgment and communication around all those things.

Can you break down how you describe what you research? You know, at a very basic level, I try to research how people are influenced by information, how people are persuaded by ideas and information. And what I've become really interested in the last few years is how we can help people resist and detect attempts to manipulate us online but also offline when it comes to you know, fake

news and misinformation, disinformation, all of those things. But also study you know the nature of how information spreads on social media and how that influences people and what is happening on these platforms. Where are people engaging in flame wars? And you know, why do we see polarization and social media a good thing or a bad thing? So very difficult and complex questions. When did you start down this path?

I started out pretty late. I didn't necessarily come from a academic oriented family, and so I got a job. I thought that's the thing you need to do. You need to make some money and get a job going to the real world. And so that's what I did, And I actually ended up working at a bank and had a kind of a crisis in terms of what I was doing with my life, and so I decided to quit that job go back to school. And that's how I got into academia. And I think I was lucky that I got to work in a few jobs

that I really didn't like. So I never looked back in terms of my own experience because what I got to do now, experiment on people is fun. Even when I was little, I loved experimenting on people and learning about how they react. And I would you know, I had set up elaborate schemes to see what people would do, just because of my curiosity and in human behavior. I hear you using the term misinformation and occasionally disinformation, and out in the wild, these terms are often used together.

Sometimes there's a slash between them. Sometimes people use them interchangeably, even if they might not intend to. So for the record and for clarity, what is misinformation? What is disinformation?

How are they different? That's a great question. I've defined misinformation as in a lot of the work, we're doing information that is simply false or incorrect, and so this can include things like simple journalistic errors, but it doesn't tell you whether it's misinforming people by accident or intentionally. And so, for me, disinformation is misinformation coupled with some

psychological intend to deceive or harm other people. And that's also why people get more upset about certain kinds of disinformation than than others, because we can all forgive people for making honest mistakes and errors, but it's different when someone's targeting you or actively trying to dupe you. But it gets complex. Let me give you an example. Let's say that the Chicago Tribune, which is you know otherwise, I think the headline was doctor died shortly after receiving

the COVID vaccine. Now, these were two independent events, and one might have nothing to do with the other. There's an investigation that was ongoing. But are you misinforming people by constructing a headline in that way? And so it's not only that there's these sort of fringe outlets spamming us with disinformation. Here's the question that they do that intentionally. I don't know. I think these are the complex bigger questions that we tried to study. The formulation of disinformation

equals misinformation plus deceptive intent. That resonates with me. That's how I've tried to understand it. But what you just shared about the Chicago Tribune example reminds me that even misinformation, the innocent kind of version of disinformation, can be harmful, and both versions breed a level of mistrust overall. Because just my level of doubt is raised now about vaccines, about the Chicago Tribune, about Facebook, because I just don't

know whether they intended it or not. Falseness is spreading throughout the land. I think that's a great point because even something that wasn't intentionally created to be harmful, let's say it was a mistake, it can then be used or weaponized by people who have a certain motivated or political view. So if you don't like the vaccine, this

is now a great example for you to start sharing. See, you know, a doctor died because they got the vaccine, and so now it can be weaponized and used in social media for a cause that maybe it wasn't intended to serve. So something can start out as misinformation and then become disinformation so our whole podcast is called how to Citizen, and the premises that we all have a role to play in shaping our society's the whole self government thing. We believe in it were nerds for that reason.

I'm curious what you've learned about human behavior and decision making in digital spaces that can make it hard for us to self govern and participate in our society. You know, I think one of the lessons that I've learned at a basic level people to have a motivation to be accurate. We do want to know what's going on in the world.

For most people, that's kind of a default baseline. But then when you're put in situations that's basically thwart that internal sort of radar that you have, things can get pretty ugly. What happens when you go on social media is that there's all sorts of different incentives that appeal to people that have nothing to do with accuracy. What are other powerful forces that influence our decision making? You go online, you see some things that's not only been

shared by somebody you trust and know. That type of information gets priority from people because we use it as a heuristic. If information comes from somebody already know and trust there's an implicit assumption that's been vetted and verified by that person and they wouldn't share anything to do people. But now it also has a thousand likes, it's been shared fifty thousand times. That's a powerful indicator something important is going on that you might want to share it

as well. And then there's the filter. So Facebook is filtering things based on your prior click behavior and things that you've looked at. And then you know, you're focused with making a decision. What are you sharing online? What are you paying attention to? You know, In one study, will looked at millions and millions of posts on Twitter and Facebook and what's the stuff that generates the most engagement. It's posts that derogate the out group. So if you're

a liberal, the outgroup is a conservative. If you're conservative, the outgroup is a liberal. And so we coded posts for whether it was you know, positive or negative and about liberals or conservatives, And across millions of posts, the number one thing that got the most tractions is basically trash talk about the other group. That is what it

gets engagement on social media. So when you come in all accuracy motivated it and call them and honest, and you get distracted by this incentive to start hating on people, essentially because that's what's it you like, So that's what gets promoted, that's what gets shared, that's what's the norm on the platform. Then that's what influences your judgments and behaviors much more so than other facts. It's kind of like you're back in high school when you're on social media.

That social pressure is back, you know, and how do we fix that is a big problem, and so we certainly have some ideas. Whether or not social companies are keen on them is another and I should say that I do advise social media companies. Part of what they're doing is on a micro level, they're trying to find misinformation, they're trying to get fact checkers on board. They helped them on how to debunk misinformation more effectively on their platform,

and these are kind of micro solutions. Right, there's a problem. They try to fix it by getting more facts out there, by you know, upgrading the way that they correct misinformation on on their plat form. But at the end of the day, I think what they're not thinking about is that if you really want to change the incentives that people face on social media. You're gonna have to rethink

the whole nature of the platform. What we want to envision is a place where people have a motivation to be accurate, to share factual information, to have constructive conversations, to have positive conversations. The other thing that they'll say, and I think this is very interesting to me, is that we didn't design this platform to help people be as accurate as they can be. That's not the purpose of social media. We're not. They admit that, I admit

that we're not. We're not interested in getting everyone to have the you know, scientific opinions and the truth driven. We're not in the truth business. And they want people to have fun, they have the conversations that they want to have, even if they're they're spicy, and will admit and say, look, that's not our purpose. Our purposes to let people have all kinds of conversations, and we're not we're not going to regulate necessarily what people say. I

think that's the issue. I think maybe to enhance a better environment for everyone on social media, we have to just fundamentally change the incentives, which means you're not going to get as much engagement, and that's a difficult that's a difficult ask if you really want to fix this problem, we're gonna have less engagement means you're gonna make it. Less money means we're gonna have a different kinds of incentives. And I think that's just not a business decision they're

willing to make. When we come back, Sander and I get into how playing games can enhance democracy. You can do both at the same time. It's dope. Talk to me about how someone engages in spreading wildly inaccurate information. I'm one of these platforms. I'm talking microchips in my maderna shot, I'm talking five G towers pumping out COVID, even things that are counter factual to observed reality fly around. What is the psychology of that kind of spread? Why

do people keep sharing it? Yeah? Why why do people keep sharing it? One theory is kind of what I call more of a generous take on the human decision making condition that we find ourselves in. Right, It's called the inattention account. If you think of the brain as a computer being bombarded with information, and so our memories are limited and our attention spans limited, you know, there's

too much going on and we're getting distracted. If only there was a way to bring accurate information to your attention, then the problem would be solved. Overwhelmed human is the charitable interpretation. What's the other one? The other account is a bit more nefarious, right. It's suggests that people are actively biased, and that we share content because we want to promote or identify with the kind of social groups that we belong to. We have a political identity that

we want to make salient to people. It might be the case that you share content not because you really believe it. It's not that you're you don't believe climate change or you don't believe in the vaccine. You're sharing it because it reinforces the narrative of your group. It makes the connections that you have with other people you

care about stronger. It helps you give you a sense of purpose and agency and that you're belonging to a movement um thinking about Q and on, for example, and so it reinforces what we call a sense of social identities. What you're describing sounds like gang colors and membership. You're literally signaling your membership and the facts or lack thereof don't matter nearly as much as you wave in that color.

It's very understandable, and I think I can even see it from my own experience with this whole idea of like when I see an article that confirms me, I'm like, yeah, that's why am I knew Big Evil Corp? Was big and evil? Then I'll share the hell out of that. But then if I see some like wonderfully written defense of like well why globalization has actually been on net part, I'm like, whatever, that's be as somebody made that up.

That's this information because I don't even I actually don't want to believe it because it challenges me, not intellectually, but like identificationally or something like I don't I already know who I am. I don't want to be someone different. I've invested a lot in this identity, so I'm not

going to share something that challenges me. Then you just add, you know, fuel to that fire when you put it on a technology platform that has a financial incentive to turn up those dials and hit both explanations of why we do what we do. So you have this concept of pre bunking that I find fascinating. Can you explain it? Yeah, absolutely. Pre Bunking is the idea that rather than trying to correct something after a fact, which was usually called debunking,

it's that you try to do it preemptively. M hmm. But the idea here it goes further. It follows the biomedical vaccination metaphor exactly. So, just as you inject people with the weakened dose of the virus to trigger at the production of antibodies and an attempt to help confer immunity against future infection, turns out you can do the

same with misinformation. When you expose people to severely and sufficiently weakened dose of the misinformation virus quote unquote or the techniques that are used to spread misinformation, people can build up cognitive or intellectual antibodies against them and become more resistant. So we should at prebunk when it's possible.

You know, viruses have different incubation periods, misinformation pathogens have different periods, and in the sense that even when you've already been exposed, it can still be beneficial, but at some point it's going to be too late. But pretty bunk when you can yeah, that doesn't work. We can do fact checking in real time and if it doesn't work. We can still try to debunk and correct things after the fact. I guess we haven't really talked about why

that's less effective. It very brief. It's less effective because once you're exposed to a falsehood, it sits in your memory. It makes friends with all the things you know. And so we know from research and when people acknowledge a correction, even when they acknowledge it, they continue to retrieve false details from memory about the event. And I think it's

something very basic. If I don't know, I don't know where you live, but if I told you that down your street and went to one of the restaurants, and you know, I got food poisoning was real bad. A week later, I tell you, oh, look listen, actually it wasn't that restaurant, it was another one. Every time you're going to pass by that restaurant, you've gotta think food poisoning. That's a difficult thing with corrections. It lingers in your mind because this association has been made. And that's why

pre bunking is ideal. How did this idea emerge? Can you put me in the room or the zone that you or your team or wherever this idea came from. How did it emerge? Yeah, well, I actually can tell you that there was a psychologist in the sixties this psychological warfare, or at least it's one place. His name

is Bill McGuire. He's no longer alive. Psychological warfare. He developed some articles, very early articles, and something he called the inoculation theory, which at the time was following the biomedical iganization metaphor, but the use of this force as an integral popular combat has now taken on new forms. He was concerned during the Korean War. You know that some of the prisoners award and there was a whole

paranoia about them being brainwashed at the time. Now we know that there's other explanations for why some of these soldiers voluntarily didn't choose to come back to the United States. One example was racism, but at the time the predominant narrative was that these soldiers were brainwashed. Here also, it was a chance to see directly into the communist state through the eyes of typical, average young American, and so McGuire was thinking, well, is it possible to develop this

is the vaccine for brainwash? You know, how how would you do that? The kind of key solution at the time was the military and the White House stuff. They were saying, Oh, the problem is American values aren't clear enough to the people, And McGuire said, that's actually not the issue. The issue is that the soldiers were not prepared for the type of manipulation strategies that they would be confronted with because the Chinese camps at the time,

they weren't violent necessarily, they said, welcome to the other side. Here, we're going to educate you about what's really going on with communism. It's not some evil thing, and we're not going to necessarily harm you. We just want to re educate you. That presented a lot of counter arguments to capitalism.

They had daily lectures and classes, and so what I think what McGuire was trying to say was that they really hadn't anticipated in an attack on the foundations of capitalism, and a lot of them started they had no prior defenses against They just assumed capitalism is good. They were prepared for a war of military arms and weapons. They were not prepared for a war of information ship exactly. Yeah,

you never got to the propaganda, the misinformation. He kind of left this idea moved on to all other ideas. It got buried for sixty years. So I was sitting in the library one day and I came across one of his articles and I was like, Wow, this is gonna be so if we could develop this idea further now in this context, is going to be so interesting.

So we kind of picked up where he left off and started actually testing this in the context of misinformation, and we thought, how could we bring this into the

twenty one century. And one of the things we did is we started simulating a social media feed in a in a kind of simulator machine together with gaming a company and a Vida literacy company that we teamed up with and a bunch of programmers, big team, and then we decided to produce some real world interventions where people can enter what we called the disinformation Simulator that would be exposed to these weakend doses of the key techniques

that are being used to deceive us online. And then we found that over time people can build up, you know, immunity. This is so so perfect because simulations are used in trainings of all kinds. You know, pilots have flight simulators and you know, infantry have the first person shooters simulator, and we use games to teach. So you built this simulator, this game to extend McGuire's thinking about inoculation theory into a more modern day practice, not against you know, Chinese

political propaganda, but against social media distributed propaganda. What a fascinating path from the sixties to now. One of the quotes that I've pulled out during this process was from Harry Potter Books professor Several Snake, who said, we want to find the dark arts, then our defenses must be as flexible and inventive as the arts that we seek to undo. And I think our our common realization was the dark arts of manipulation are evolving sciences as ayn

factor for a lot of people. We got to go out of the lab produce some things that are entertaining and fun for people so that we can actually get this out and test it in the real world and make it fun and entertaining and not you know, so people don't get the feeling that they're attending a lecture, but they're actually playing a part and generating their own antibodies. I've played the game that you and your team have created that's built around this inoculation theory, and I gotta

tell you, I'm very impressed. Like it revealed. It was like lifting a veil on the matrix. I was like, oh, that's how this works. Oh, I was invested in creating disinformation. You kind of you simulated me as a chaos monkey, as an agent of chaos visited upon this fictional place. Can you explain the game Harmony Square and how it works to put into practice this inoculation theory we've been

talking about, Yeah, you know, it's great. So we have a couple of interventions, and Harmony Square was one that focused on disinformation during elections and political sort of disinformation. We also have bad News, which is our general simulator, which is not specific to a particular domain. It's a

sort of very broad. But Harmony Square came about and because there was an interest in inoculating people against foreign influence techniques that are being used to medal with democracies and elections and of course such a big topic that we wanted to do a specialized version of some of the more general simulators that we've build. Congratulations, you are hired and welcome to your first day as our new Chief Disinformation Office. Harmony Square is a green and pleasant place.

It's famous for its living statue, it's majestic Point Swap and it's a new Pineacle Peaks festival. We talked that basic idea of Harmony Square, which is the last democracy on Earth at Depressing. That's there you enter into a peaceful town. The contents all fictional, and it's supposed to be a bit ludicrous, right that there's this fictional town and something very innocuous happens. Using that kind of narrative, we try to inoculate people against some of these techniques

that are used to polarize people. M hm m m. Yeah. If you goes here an illusionist or a magic show the first time, you might be duped. And there's really two ways to fix that. Once I'm going to give you a blueprint of how the trick works, which is kind of like a factual sort of treatment. Or I could let you step into the shoes of the illusionist for a little while so you can discover the trick on your own, and that way you're never going to

be duped by it again. Chaos is what counts. Let's create another alter ego account and pretend to we're on the other side of this fight. I am totally ramped up. I am invested in this egg. On the other side as well, Oh, we're definitely using bots deploy the bots. I love that. Man. When I tell you like I enjoyed it. You made me into a monster and I

loved it. That's that's how effective the game was. I played a lot of games I've overseen, like hackathons with creative activists and comedians and stuff before, so I thought I knew what I was getting into. And by the end, I was like, I'm going to destroy this town, like we won't even remember it existed. And so you have insensivized really devastating behavior. I was rewarded for it. You track the amount of followers you get after each wave of these campaigns and do you want to escalate or

go home? Definitely want to escalate, right. So I look back after this and I'm like, oh, man, can you connect the dots from this game back to the real world? And how an experience like this, whether it's this game or some of your other projects, helps me interface with and process my actual social media feed better. How are my defenses more activated against the real life misinformation and disinformation? Yeah?

Absolutely so? As you said, there's a bit of a shock value to the game, because precisely, one of the core elements of inoculation theory is that people need to experience a sense of threat to motivate themselves to want to defend themselves against misinformation attacks. We need to activate your antibody production, and so we need to get people,

you know, into the mode. And as you said, of their elections going on during the game, and there's a newscaster and you can see the approval ratings live and as you cast your chaos, they're they're affected. And there's this candidate and you have a Samarican pain about them. How are you going to ruin? Actually plugs unopposed, run message family and friends, or create a fake news site. All right, here's another option, Ashley plugs disgusting chat messages leaked.

I'm bleeping hate bears. This is the kind of chaos. We need to post this and then oh, it's like a sloth photo. What the words please, it's meant to be a bit amusing. What we do at the end of all of our interventions is we evaluated empirically, so at the beginning of the game, and I'm not sure if you participated in I did. I did everything I

was asked to do. We give people some stimulated social media headlines, and we asked them how reliable they think that are, how confident they are un their judgment, but they would share it on social media and things like that. And the types of headlines that we give kind of reflect what's going down social media. So I'll give you an example. Basically as people protesting saying and Father's Day

and other people you know and so and so. It's this it is an issue that's getting blown up, potentially by by nefarious actors because they wanted to sow divisions, and so we want to know, I have people become more tuned to this strategy of of for example, in this case polarization. Another was a news article tweet about a news article that I think it was a father and his and his son and they went out hunting and shot themselves or something, and so many commented, oh,

one point five magabilities less in the world. It's this type of deeply polarizing sort of debate that we wanted to address. And what we found is that people are better able to recognize these strategies in the sense that they found these posts less reliable. After playing a game, they're less likely to say that they'll share this type of content on social media once people leave the game. We've we started to follow up with them a week after week and don't worry, we get ethics approval from

this from the university. But we we sort of attacked people with misinformation week week after week, and so at tax House nefarious. But we basically present people with social media posts that are misinformation and we ask you know, the same questions. And what we found is that actually for a psychological vaccine, it lasts pretty long, for about two months. The antibodies are still there, you know, after two months. It helps when you boost people in between.

So we found that there's a decay like what the Fiser vaccine, and you need a booster otherwise it wears off. There's too many distracts we call interference going on in the world that makes people forget and get less motivated. But you can boost people in between by re engaging them. One of our interventions the bad News, which is the sort of the main simulator when viral on Reddit, and they can actually crashed our service, so they call it the Reddit Hug of Death. The Red Hug of Death.

Yet we started, like, we started scraping what the redditors were talking about, for example, and it was really interesting to learn about, you know, people sharing their experience about the game and what they've learned, and they started getting

us thinking about her immunity. And wait, maybe maybe people are airing the inoculation with each other on social media, And wouldn't that be cool that if people talked about what they've learned share with others, so that even people who didn't directly play the game can benefit from the vaccine sort of speak. And so that's kind of what we're working on now. So I played one of your games, and I'm a good person, Sander. I am open minded.

I vote for the right people. But there's other people out there, Sander, who are not the best, and they spread lies and deceptive information all the time. Are they playing your game? To Sander? Is the other side playing this game? Are my Q and on brethren playing in

your game? Well? It's interesting. I don't think that die hard conspiracy theorists are playing our game, but we aren't thinking about some ways of trying to reach a broader audience in terms of the inoculation and getting it, you know, getting it scaled to people who might not voluntarily, who might not volunteer to come in and sort of learn more about this stuff. The epidemiological metaphor of vaccination and inoculation is so clear as a strength to me, but

it's something that has some limits. So we're in a real epidemiological challenge right now with COVID nineteen and vaccines are a tool, but they're not the only tool, right and with any infectious disease, we don't just rely on people to inoculate themselves against the threat. We have public health agencies, we have government policies, companies institute barriers. So yeah, big question, but simplified, what else can we do if not every person on Earth plays your game to still

get a handle on the misinformation disinformation challenge? I think the uncomfortable spot that we're all in, especially as a scientist, is that it seems unrealistic. What else can we do that they're willing to accept? And for us, YouTube actually doesn't work directly with outside scientists. It's actually it's it's very difficult to implement an evidence based sort of freebunk

on their platform. So I gottapplause you there earlier in our conversation, you um acknowledge, and you know, these platforms acknowledge. They're not in the business of accuracy or truth right there, in the business of engagement, their business of entertaining conversation, probably user growth. But you just said about YouTube doesn't work with outside researchers directly, that sounds to me like they don't want to know the truth. They're actively avoiding

understanding the impact of their platforms on us. What's your read on that decision. I think there's probably some truth to that. Probably doesn't only apply to YouTube, but to most social media companies, because the fact of the matter is we can say what we want to them, and we say a lot to them, and we have meetings with them regularly, and they listen to us, and they do respect to us, and and they take our evidence.

But you know, they say they have their own internal evidence that they don't always want people to extract to ee weight externally. So what can we say. It's like, okay, the way they hold on they have their own facts, they have their they have alternative facts, they have their own alternative facts. This is terrible, but it's tricky, you know, because they say, oh, in your experiment, you're just simulating Facebook.

We can actually see what's happening on Facebook, and it's like, yeah, but if you don't want to share it, then we're not getting anywhere. But we have very little information about what is actually going on in these platforms the studies that we do from social media because we get limited access to scrape millions of posts, but it's it's only a snapshot really of what's what's going on. And they're very hesitant to work with scientists and needs a long

time to build up relationships. We're getting there, but it's difficult. I just want to say, agree with you. To us, it seems like a win where you can get them to implement an evidence based solution, even if it's a minor one. And I will say the people that we work with and the research teams at these companies there are really motivated and they really want to fix the problems. I think the issue is with the high level policy executive people who just shoot down the sort of more

artical and solutions that we need. I think that the problem is with the people a higher up, not necessarily the research teams or we're going out making connections with researchers reading our papers, wanting to fund our research, want to implement a solutions, and then they go to their bosses and they say, interesting, we'll think a much. We'll look congratulations for having any level of dialogue and partnership with these large organizations. So we're going in the right direction.

Whether we're going far enough, fast enough, we should argue about that. On social media, I'd love to know how you think about the impact you've had, whether it's in the partnership world with these companies, whether it's working with governments, or whether it's just you know, individuals from a Reddit or some other social share coming across some of these games. I mean with Facebook weekly, I take time, you know, how did my schedule every week to try to Yeah,

and that's incredible. How much furniture do you throw during these well, you know, and it is and and there. The team is really good, but the decisions that are ultimately made it's slow, and it's very slow process. But we're making progress. But no, it's not. It's not going

fast enough. We need more radical changes in solutions. We we try to team up with the organizations that are impactful in the area that we're working, whether it's a Department of Homeland Security who can distribute this to all political parties and so on, or with our COVID nineteen

game called go Viral. We got some support from the World Health Organization and the United Nations, and you know, they have volunteers that can target this intervention at vulnerable audiences and really help scale it across millions of people. But there's billions of people in the world, not just millions. So I think, what can people do? Here's my general philosophy for society. I think we need a firewall system to mitigate the post truth sort of biased that's that's

creeping in. And so this firewall system, or a multi layer defense system should start with the pre bunking. So we should all prebunk the w HL, the social media companies, even regular companies. And then at the same time we have to radically reinvent the incentive structure of social media. So nothing big, nothing big that I'm floating here, that's all. That's all. So so we call this show how to Citizen. Whe We think of citizen as a verb, not a noun or legal status, so much as a posture of

participation in society. What's your view on what citizening means to you. I think being a good citizen means not only maintaining a healthy information diet or yourself, but also helping other people to discertain fact from fiction in their lives. And I think that's how I see morale, is that it's not just about me, it's also about helping my fellow citizen not get duped. This is a refreshing take on a challenge that so many of us just feel

hopeless about. So thank you for another perspective on that. I'm excited that you've built something that's fun and terrifyingly effective at the same time. That's hard trick to pull off, So thank you, Sander for the time. I look forward to a more sane and healthy information environment for us all to have it. Thanks so much for having me on. We've all been there. I know I have. Just kicking it on the Internet and some jerk shows up spreading infuriating,

lee incorrect garbage. So we do what any good citizen is supposed to do. We dump data, we fire all facts. We counter that misinformation with real information to prove that jerk wrong. But Sander wants us to reimagine and reframe the way we approach misinformation. We can't hit people over the head with facts. Whack a mole is in a

active games like harmony Square. On the other hand, they teach us some of the dark arts of misdirection and illusion, and like peeking behind the curtain and seeing the great and powerful odds for the first time. Once you see him and his dirty bag of tricks, he loses some of his power. So stay safe, stay alert. Think twice before you hit that share button, but honestly, think also about who even wants you to hit the button in the first place, and what they have to gain from it.

As we check in with ourselves about the content we consume. Next time, we get a lesson on tech nutrition, because machines gotta eat too. Bias in, bias out like garbage in, garbage out. You feed this machine something, the machine is going to look exactly like what you fed it. You are what you eat. By now you know we're committed to giving you things to do beyond listening to our episodes.

And I knew how the citizen dot com website, we've got every episode transcripts, links to the guests, but most importantly, we have things you can do to actually practice citizening. So in that spirit, for this episode, here's some things you can do. Point your browser over to inoculation dot science. That's right, there's a dot science domain name. Get your science on. Head on over to an oculation dot science one end, and play the set of games that they've built.

In addition to breaking Harmony Square, which you heard me playing and acting the damn fool as I did, so, they've got games to help you limit the harm of fake news and COVID misinformation. After you've played some of the games and watch some of the videos, reflect on how they made you feel. Are there online experiences you've had that make more sense once you consider you might have been intentionally manipulated. How does that feel? I suspect it makes you mad, but also it might make you

feel more empowered. And do you think these games might affect how you engage online in the future. Finally, share these games with the people you care about. So many of us have folks in our lives, and we don't want to waste hours and hours convincing them of something that's so obviously false when we take real information into account. Look, friends don't let friends spread misinformation. It's kind of as simple as that. I don't expect you to memorize all this.

Everything I've said is a version of it in the show notes, in the podcast app you're listening on right now, and we've got all these links over at how to citizen dot com. You can also engage with us on I G on Zuckerberg's property. We are at how to Citizen where you can share and learn from other people who own this journey with us, including me. That's all I got for now. Peace. How to Citizen with Barriton Day is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts and

dust Light Productions. Are Ecutive producers are Me Barry to Day Thurston, Elizabeth Stewart, and Misha Usa. Our senior producer is Tamika Adams, our producer is Ali Kilts, and our assistant producer is Sam Paulson. Stephanie Cohne is our editor, Valentino Rivera is our senior engineer, and Matthew Lai as our apprentice. Special thanks to Sam Paulson for creating the chip tune arrangement of the how the Citizen theme and the Harmony Square inspired tunes to accompany my game play.

This episode was produced in sound designed by Tamika Adams with additional help from Sam Paulson. Additional production help from Arwin Knicks. Special thanks to Joel Smith from my Heart Radio and Rachel Garcia at Dusklight Productions.