Doctor Mike

And so this was another thing that was hard to convey sometimes, which is that real people hold these opinions, right?

When the Russians are pretending to be Texas secessionists, there are real Texas secessionists.

These are not opinions that Russia simply made up and implanted into the American mind.

These are real opinions that real people hold.

And so we're not going to content moderate our way out of this by taking bad ideas off the Internet.

So a lot of what we look at is more things like are there technological or design solutions that make some of these behaviors less impactful as opposed to over focusing on the content or the message itself?

It's really not the content.

I mean, I think that's the thing that we've hit a point now where, you know, you used to be able to tell people there was a type of generative AI, sorry, a type of AI that was used to generate a lot of fake profile pictures, generative adversarial networks, where one AI would kind of work against another AI to produce a...

Now they don't look very realistic anymore several years out, but two years ago they looked fairly realistic for the time, human face.

But you could tell people like it gets the ears wrong often.

The earrings are often mismatched.

The teeth are not numerically accurate.

They're not symmetrical.

The collar tends to blend into the hair.

So you could give people tips.

And I remember

Working with NPR because we found a network of a couple and maybe a couple thousand of these things on on LinkedIn and I actually didn't think it was a particularly interesting find I thought of it as like kind of a spam network, but it was people it was like these spammers who were pretending to be Lead you know lead gen salesmen they just and then what they wanted to do was connect because once they connected with you they looked more real and

because you could see like oh my friend is connected to this person also and so they were just trying to network their way into communities and um i thought it was a fairly boring thing actually but it was one of the things that i got more inbound emails from people who were like thank you so much i see these these accounts people reach out to me on linkedin i never know whether to accept them or not you know these tips that npr put out i found them so helpful

So I think that people really do feel acutely that there is so much manipulation on the Internet and they are you know, they're very worried about about scams.

And the sort of sad reality is that those tips from two years ago are useless now.