Dr. Todd Rose

And life gets much worse for you, but it also gets much worse for the rest of us.

Because as a result, we end up with this false polarization, right?

We feel like we're completely divided and it becomes self-fulfilling.

We lose trust in each other and we become resentful.

Yeah.

We're the first generation now as a society that has to deal with collective illusions at scale because of social media.

Like it just, you cannot trust your brain to tell you what your group thinks anymore.

You can't.

And that's a hard thing to overcome.

And when you put it into social media environment,

Even if there's no bad actors, just the dynamics of that, the loudest voices, will guarantee that you're going to be wrong the longer you spend time on there.

But it gets even worse.

So my organization has partnered with other organizations.

We've been studying the way in which foreign entities that are trying to disrupt us have built bot armies.

Russia, China, they have millions of bots, some of them AI-enabled now.

And we often think when it's propaganda and manipulation that they're just spreading disinformation.

It's not what they do at all.

The new form of propaganda is the ability to manufacture a collective illusion.

to convince them that their communities believe things they don't.

And that need to belong kicks in.