Brian Soebbing

Yeah, I mean, rage baiting or rage farming is really taken off in the age of social media.

It involves a two-pronged strategy among folks that would love to see us more divided, right?

First, they plant a seed that gets their opponents all riled up, and in reacting to that seed, they rile up their own side, right?

And it just keeps going back and forth, back and forth.

I mean, it happens more in terms of volume.

It happens more quickly.

I think the dynamics of social media also make it, because we're used to the dopamine hits, right, that we get from engaging quickly with material.

A lot of us can get taken away by it, right?

And as you said, David, we all fall victim to it.

One of the things that I've learned, I'm sure Peter is the same,

as we've been designing this course and doing the research around it, is that, you know, we fall victim to this all the time.

And it's giving us tools to help engage better with our partners.

Yeah, I mean, start by looking at yourself.

And I said before, as we were researching, we found that we were committing a lot of these democratic sins.

I spent a lot of last summer touring around the province of Alberta talking with municipal officials and their staff who meet with folks online, meet with folks at the doorstep.

And we cataloged 34 different what we're calling pitfalls or pathologies of democratic discourse.

Things that range from, you know, ad hominem attacks to gaslighting to, you know, reductionist thinking and dichotomous thinking and so on.

And as we went through and discussed with them, we said, how much of this do you see?

And they said quite often, how much of this do you think is a problem?

Right.