some news outlet somewhere has written the story you want to believe;

As storytellers, influencers use the same techniques as screenwriters, novelists, and playwrights: familiarity, novelty, and repetition.

The final role for government in ensuring transparency is to empower independent researchers.

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.

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

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

Right now, notifications about sensational ragebait, Main Character harassment mobs, or feeds that reward spamming are the default. But three broad design shifts could mitigate these destructive dynamics and minimize the risk of technical triumphs becoming social disasters. The first applies Simon’s guidance to the curation systems that steer our a

“Report-Analyze-Publicize.”

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