Dr. Todd Rose

Right?

And I still have, we still haven't gotten through all the toilet paper that I grabbed.

Yeah.

So, so again, this is the problem is that through evolution, we've got a shortcut for estimating group consensus, which is the loudest voices.

And it's, you know, it's loud voices repeated.

Even when you intellectually know it's the same person or a small number of people, that's not how your brain is treating it.

Your brain is treating, it's mistaking essentially noise for numbers and it will just assume this is what the group thinks.

And again, it's,

while this is a fundamental thing about being human, we've never lived with this kind of social technology before, which makes it drop dead easy for anyone in their parents' basement to be able to drive an illusion, right?

And what's worse is state actors have figured this out.

So like both Russia and China do this all the time on social media in the United States.

They have these bots

that are programmed to swarm.

And what they do is rather than spread lies, they actually go into say conservative Twitter and liberal Twitter, and they actually tease out fringe ideas, right?

So they're real Americans saying something, but they're not very popular.

And then they retweet the heck out of them until it starts to feel like that's actually the dominant view.

And so by doing that, if they do it on both sides, politically,

they can drive each of them to the extremes.

And it gives this perception of deep polarization in society when it's actually just an illusion.

On the left,