Doctor Mike

And so we tend to, you know, look at it as this hybrid of, um,

studying tactics and social behavior.

Um, sometimes, sometimes they are hyper aware, meaning sometimes people think that there's a Russian bot, you know, anytime they see a social media post that they disagree with.

So that's the, that's the downside.

So you want, you want to like a good degree of awareness, but not a, not a, uh, an unhealthy degree of skepticism that sometimes is hard, hard balance to strike.

Um, I know that when we started, you know, again, when I was doing the Senate, the research for the Senate intelligence committee on, on Russia, um,

It was very important to try to get people to hold two ideas in their heads at once, which is this is real and this is happening.

This is not the be all end all.

Right.

This didn't necessarily swing the election.

This doesn't mean that every time you see a, you know, for example, right wing account that you disagree with, that it's a Russian troll, you know, making people realize that.

But at the same time, sometimes you are, in fact, engaging with an account that's there solely to get a rise out of you, solely to manipulate you.

And these things wax and wane over time.

For a while, automated accounts, bots...

were useful in part because they helped just draw attention to a topic, right?

Making something trend on Twitter was a big prize because that would draw real people's attention to it and then real people would start to talk about it.

And so even if that was started under false or manipulative pretenses,

real people would eventually start to talk about it.

And so it wasn't that it was completely manufactured.

It was that there was a degree of like throwing gasoline on the fire.