Invisible Rulers

“freedom of speech not freedom of reach”

“Report-Analyze-Publicize.”

the attention economy has grown, so has the attention deficit.

Learning now about how algorithms function, how tropes and rhetoric work, and why we might be incentivized to spin up outrage can help us recognize when and how we are being manipulated and make us more informed participants. And so, education is our final, and perhaps most powerful, lever.

F, “Find the Facts,” reminded people that there was plenty of time to study a topic before coming to a conclusion; there was no need to rush to judgment on the timeline of the propagandist, and the responsible listener should interrogate why the propagandist might want them to. G, “Guard Against Omnibus Words,” highlighted the importance of being a

One area where regulators should concentrate, however, is commercial speech and paid political speech that goes undisclosed by influencers. Consumers have a right to be informed about the financial incentives of the people who promote products and politicians.

is vital for an informed public, and government can prioritize it in three areas: in disclosing state actor influence operations to the public, in declaring their own takedown requests, and in ensuring that outside researchers have the tools necessary to study the powerful private actors of Big Tech.

1. Name calling—giving an idea a bad label—is used to make us reject and condemn the idea without evidence. 2. Glittering generality—associating something with a “virtue word”—is used to make us accept and approve the thing without evidence. 3. Transfer carries over the authority, sanction, or prestige of something respected and revered in order to ma

Posts that are beginning to go viral could be thrown into a queue for a crowd-sourced fact-check,