 translating it for you. We will have a talk about digital manipulation resiliency. There will be a breakout room later and the link for that is in the schedule. Lehrrichter works with many things and most of them have to do with the dreamworld internet and learning processes with children, such things. What's interesting to her in the moment is the digital manipulation resiliency. What it is, she will tell us. She will talk quickly because a lot of things have to be put in and yeah, enjoy. Yeah, I'm happy that you are warned in advance. There will be quite a high speed. I hope you can follow anyway. My name is Lehrrichter and as announced earlier it's going to be about digital manipulation resiliency. So how can we resist manipulation? So the question is how and why does manipulation work and why does populistic narratives and propaganda work? Why do people believe that? Why do people believe in conspiracy myths? And yeah, to answer that we have to check why are we susceptible to manipulation and I say we because a typical idea that many people have is yeah, other people are manipulated. It's those idiots over there. It would never happen to me. Which is a nice feeling because then you don't have to but of course all of us can fall for manipulation so all of us should know how it works and how to protect ourselves. So how are we affected by this? There are three main points that I find interesting or important. All of us have psychological needs that can be used and abused. We all have faces in our lives that we are more susceptible and vulnerable faces and all of us have a brain that can be a trick systematically. So what are our basic needs? Well, maybe Maslow's pyramid no, it's more psychological basic needs and there are several concepts about this. Most people agree on the first three but others at the other two and I find them important as well. Them as important as well. So I want to show all five to you. First is tie or bonding or bond and not only to your parents but also belonging to a social group that's relevant. We wish to belong and we see this also as protection to belong. The next is control and orientation so that also is connected to feeling safe. We want to feel safe. If we know our area, our surroundings then we are able to have control. At least we have the feeling to be able to do so. The feeling of control also creates a feeling of safety. The next one is the idea of self-worth. That's very important when we are talking about problems. All of us have the feeling that we are not good enough and that's unpleasant because we want to have a good self-image and want to be seen as good from the outside. So that's what we are talking about when we are talking about self-worth. The next is delight or desire creating it and avoid unpleasant situations. We will see this in the examples more closely later. And then last but not least we have meaning. We want a life with meaning and purpose. And when that doesn't work then someone can come and say, well, come to us, then we give you purpose. You will have purpose with us. And with this meaning of course is connected to self-worth because if I think my life has a meaning then that protects my self-worth. I will come back to these all the time. You don't have to memorize them but this is a very common. So vulnerable phases. All of us have them when we really want long for connection especially puberty. That's the most common one. When you have the questions, who am I? Am I okay as I am? What's my role? Can I do what I really want to do in my life? What do I want to become? And especially with the young people who are affected by puberty already by their age they are more likely to be naive because they have fewer life lessons to look back on and fewer experiences. Then there are life crises that can lead to these vulnerable phases losing your job. When you don't have enough money you might be overwhelmed. And yeah, whenever we talk about why do people enter conspiracy theories or bubbles then we are talking about broken lives. And then people were lost or feeling lost and there they found connections. Last but not least we have the topic of having a brain that can be systematically deceived. Most of us think we are objective and quite rational but we are not really. We have cognitive biases and other bugs in our minds and of course we are bombarded with sensory input and all of it wants attention but we don't have enough attention for all of them so it gets filtered a lot also to protect our feeling of self-worth and it works. Otherwise we wouldn't be here and it doesn't work 100% so there are bugs. I brought a few examples of this and maybe you find yourself in one or two of them. Most of them are quite common shortcuts that we use. A very famous one is the so called halo effect when we handle with other people so we know one thing about them that for example they are very cleanly or they have glasses and with that associated is intelligence. There is no connection but we remember this from somewhere or if someone is attractive a beautiful person then we will just assume that they are friendly and trustworthy which obviously doesn't have to be true. That's the halo effect. Then also relevant for us today is the sympathy through similarity. If we assume that someone is similar to us no matter how we assess this we assume that they are more sympathetic to us or nicer and for groups of course important is the in-group bias so when we split a group into subgroups a school class for example we split it into group A and group B then immediately group A starts thinking group A is better just because they were split into groups we don't have any explanation yet just the splitting into groups will cause this effect to happen. Another interesting point for manipulation attempts is commitment and consistency. So if I bring you to agree with something simple and afterwards I ask you something a bit more challenging but going in a similar direction then you will be more likely to agree again because you want to be consistent because you showed a little commitment and you want to stay consistent who said A also has to say B reactance is something more like defiance if you saw an ad that you didn't like and it made you defiant and that's also called reactance if we have a feeling that someone wants to limit us in some way then we become defiant and want to work against it that also works together with scarcity if someone says yeah this is limited edition or it's only available for two days then there is scarcity usually artificial scarcity and if I have a feeling someone wants to keep me from something then I wanted more another trick in advertisement and reciprocity if I make a gift to you then you will have a slight need to also give me a gift and if I want to manipulate you I can use that that's why you get gifts from advertisers many of these are not only connected with interacting with other people but also with learning about the world there is the negative device of course we tend to overestimate negative input and potential warnings about dangers so danger is a very important keyword here because it's possible that being afraid is important but it also means that when we have a 50-50 day 50% good, 50% bad that we focus more on the negative stuff and we then think well it was a bad day when talking about communication it also means that negative topics will capture our focus more the confirmation bias means that when we already have an opinion then we are more likely to see information that confirms our bias our already formed opinion because we want to avoid unpleasant situations and of course it's an energy saving mechanism as well if you always question yourself it costs energy of course it's a short cut that can work quite well and then the proportionality bias so if something dramatic happens we accept a reason for this that's equally dramatic there is this idea that the corona pandemic cannot just have happened due to little accidents but it must have been something big that caused it and confirmation and proportionality bias are really connected to conspiracy myths and when you think that's enough we are still not done because not only our thinking is warped but also the thinking about the thinking because all the things that I showed you it's quite likely that you think yeah well okay it affects other people but it doesn't hit me right because we believe that we are not affected by these effects which leads to us being less conscious about these effects and also manipulation in the internet we know these things happen but we think that's the third person effect that's about the others I'm not affected and yeah it's unpleasant I know but it affects all of us so what does that mean? these points make us all vulnerable to manipulation we have basic needs and they make us vulnerable so we want pleasure, we desire pleasure we want connection and we have faces of heightened vulnerability puberty or crises like losing a job and our brain wants to save energy and so it can be a poor judge what can this look like in reality? so we have the basic vulnerabilities we have some examples here let's assume that I'm trying to manipulate you I'm trying to gain your trust maybe I'm trying to make you buy something we have some examples here I would like the following to set the tone I would make myself look really pretty I could try to imitate what you're doing I'm talking about here the halo effect and then if I'm pretty then you can assume that I'm also intelligent and friendly I'll try to gain your sympathy and I'll do things similar to how you're doing and then also be open at the next step and then I will increase the intensity over time for fundraising I could say hey, do you have a heart for animals? no one says oh I hate animals they're awful so once you say yes to this I have a heart for animals then you have your commitment and then you want to be consistent later and then also say yes and then you can increase the intensity once you have the first commitment then it's uncomfortable to say no later maybe I'll give you a gift maybe a pen this is reciprocity so once you give someone then in 20 minutes later I will ask you if you want to buy a product what else could I do? I could promise for a community that I'll be by your side in this community so this is talking about a connection for a group also for your self-esteem and this is an exclusive community that we're talking about I can also promise you a role that's important to you that also speaks to your self-esteem what's important is also to explain it's not like everyone has the same reaction you're not going to want to get the same thing every time but you're trying to increase the probability and when you go somewhere and you combine all these tricks together then you increase the probability what's relevant for us today that under all this you feel stress and this is the key to everything you can notice the stress and you can notice that maybe you are being manipulated with these and these tricks only work when the victim doesn't recognize that they're being manipulated and right now the question is how does this work actually what are exploits that we're talking about what are the patterns we have four phenomena just all in the last years populism, propaganda radicalization and conspiracy theories I brought this explanation for a spectrum of populism how you can separate these two things could be another presentation which we're talking about extremism here and we're not just talking about on the internet here so there is this story of the great replacement and the core idea is that foreigners are brought into the country to replace the population of course they suggest an aggressiveness and the interest about this is that it legitimizes violence and a lot of bad things have happened because of it so what are the cause of this so the first sentence fleeing people are different from us they are dangerous warriors so mostly they are talking about the men only and we are working on establishing an in-group we, that's the Germans that's the good ones and the bad ones, that's the warriors, that's the foreigners and with a good in-group the self-worth of the audience is heightened and then we also have the negativity bias so it's a possible danger so it's already more important to us and then the army is a framing in the artificial frame already there are people fleeing, they are not an army but if you see them as single people you might have sympathy but if you see them as warriors, as an army you don't have sympathy you have to fight them so they try to make a certain reaction more likely and another one less likely then they are talking about waves and that's a danger for single people again, it's not a person that's coming but an amorphous mass and again, this is no accident it's manipulating language and again a victim and criminal exchange we are saying they are threatening us and of course that would legitimize violence and we are saying, yeah, they are coming here and right now we are still able to act and it would legitimize a preventative strike and whenever you hear that someone threw a Molotov cocktail into a home of those people and when they are asked, why did you do that? well, I'm just defending the motherland and that's based on these images and if you target enough people with these narratives then it's just a statistical issue that some and usually enough will react just as you want them to then usually this idea with a great replacement is also connected with the idea that the government is in on it and now I'm wondering, what does the government do? is it protecting me? and the media, are they protecting me? are they open? and now they say, no, no, no, no they are in on it you can't talk to them they are in on it you can talk to us and so people are brought into the conspiracy bubbles and in the end there is the sentence we are the only ones doing anything about this danger we are the heroes and the whole hero's journey we are the downtrodden, the suppressed and we become the heroes of the story it's a nice story but at the end of the day the people sending these messages want to gather resources be it money, be it new members so what were they doing? they had a dramatic scenario of danger they created fears they lessen trust into functioning structures and they were presenting themselves as the only solution against the fears and of course they want to use that to gather and secure power and that also answers who profits of this? well, the populist themselves let's come back to propaganda and the last weeks certainly it's very visible again so there is Russian propaganda and how they were justifying their attack on Ukraine and there is one of some of the core ideas before they really attacked before they actually attacked they were saying, well, that's fake news we are not collecting our troops near the border so Russia is saying, we as in-group we are attacked in the media Western media, they make false claims about us and here of course the Western powers are not trustworthy but we are because we know how it really is then it was said that Ukraine attacks Russians in Donbass and we need to help so they are our brothers and sisters they are part of our in-group they are attacked to become heroes and help them so a self-heroization and it's easier to justify to help others than to attack them and there is a dangerous scenario again so a negativity bias also ensures that we are attracted to this and we'll focus on it and our safety our want for safety is affected and then the next we are framing the borders away because they say the Ukraine has been part of Russia for all times and then the next one they are talking about ad-nazification of Ukraine because we are talking group with something which they all know which they carry in themselves in this story there's the Nazis and there's us it's obvious who's the good guy and who's the bad guy and now we use this image of the good guys and the Nazis and we apply it to this situation and if they are the Nazis then they are the ultimate evil there's no more evil than Nazis and we then obviously have to be the good guys and that also protects you against criticism because whoever is against me is on the side of the Nazis within this frame and that's quite obviously why it's used so what happened here well they're using pretty much every narrative that makes Russia appear innocent not a hero, not aggressive then they are using old images like the that creates a group thing like the fight against the Nazis and all other messages are named as propaganda then the offers of radicalization I brought two of them why am I saying offers there's different ways to get to radicalize yourself of course people can have certain wishes within themselves already and radicalize themselves of course that is happening what I want to show is when radical groups they start communication to to bait in vulnerable people and that's why I called it an offer so we have this example of Islamistic recruiters that's still happening so for example we have direct messages in social networks and what they like to do is address teenagers both of our examples now are addressing teenagers so extremists like to address teenagers who have an Islamic background or are seen as such so people of color basically so let's start at the beginning we're talking about teenagers so we have a vulnerable face and we start slowly just get the door in the step make them like you maybe pay a compliment and so increase their self-worth and you signal them well we are in the same group we are the same in-group we are brothers right and then right then immediately they starting with the discrimination experiences so they will never accept you the western people will never accept you and then again the in-group and out-group are strengthened you are one of us but they will not accept you they hurt you before they will hurt you again and then the question remains well if they don't accept me who can I belong to and then there's the offer you who has been rejected so much if you join us you are part of the big community of Muslims you're part of the group you will get a task with meaning you will serve God and then old images of the hell and the great antagonists the devil are brought up again and yeah if you are against it you go to hell if you help us if you are with us you will be cleansed of all sin and all will be good so we are working here we are seeing a lot of work with fear and also the promise that the fear will go away and of course negativity bias and the need for security are here as well then of course there will be there is added structure of everyday life when you as a person are asking yourself where is my place in the world and what can I do and they give you a structure because it may be work but it's worth it because it gives you meaning and a structure and then of course all external information is reclassified as untrustworthy and people are isolated so what happened here vulnerable teenagers were addressed discrimination that happened in the past is used so their negative experiences are used and solutions easy solutions are offered and they are isolated against contrary beliefs and of course there is indoctrination using rituals and media and social connections so they get sucked into the rabbit hole deeper and deeper now far right extremism and the funny thing is these two groups who are enemies extremely enemies they work together almost so the stronger extremist groups on both sides become they make it easier for the other side to recruit as well when the Nazis get far right extremists get stronger discrimination rises and rising discrimination makes it easier for Islamist groups to recruit and it's a vicious circle so ideologically they are enemies but they work almost hand in hand and very interesting that I want to show here have just center cultural recruitment like using memes that's done by both groups as well so what do we have we have pop culture offers on social media again we are in the vulnerable phase teenagers and the first of course we are saying that being German has value you might feel not nice enough not beautiful enough whatever but as soon as you are part of the group you are worth something then the good old time is mentioned and enhanced and of course the enemy be it the Jews or just the enemy is downgraded and again the beginning is low key so for example patriotism that's might not be something you like but in conservative circles that's a very positive thing but it might also be love for nature we can see on instagram how how people like it and of course other things vaporware, music, memes, youtube there are right wing influences as well and yeah they want to show I'm one of you and all of this also is fun in a way and the dangerous thing about this is that it's low key but already the content is again it's radical it's not not too obvious but it's already misentropist and of course whenever they are criticized they say no it's just irony and whenever someone attacks this within this frame that's just someone who doesn't know fun and who's too serious and of course we're talking about teenagers and teenagers really like destroying borders and crossing borders because people like to say well yeah I can handle fun and jokes but of course there is irony poisoning and that teaches that the more I watch these jokes and memes the more serious it becomes mostly we have pulling into the repertoire again and it's framed as being quite elitist or elite and so they are pushing feeling of self worth again more and more and of course cultural connection again so all these mechanisms are there again so what happened here mostly pop cultural interests were used to target teenagers and they are using those channels to put right wing ideas everywhere and extremist ideas everywhere masked as irony and jokes and they are recruiting more and more people and those people also bring money and more influence let's come to the last point in this phenomenon this is something that's grown over the last two years as a theme and especially regarding corona we are seeing viral content through YouTube videos through comments through screenshots and these are collective and very strong viral content always done here so this is the model that happened in reality as well we know that they are trying to gain our sympathy we want them to like them we are separating the big evil people over us and the small good people that are under them we are also talking about anti-semitism here unfortunately we are saying this the other bad people the other group that are against us and there is activated anti-semitism we have proportionality bias as an example here it's a tendency that once there is a result of something that has a dramatic result there is a lot of anxiety there it might be a coincidence there is an explanation of this big bad thing there is a scenario where something happens as a coincidence we hope that something doesn't actually happen we are looking for something that we can actually do so there is an influence we can have an influence on the result of something we are talking about media here and also of the yellow press sometimes there is people lying there is confirmation bias people are saying do your research people also have their own ideological bubble here so I am going to take my word for it saying google it and of course we know that there are so many sources out there that repeat my picture that something will be found so there is this confirmation bias another nice thing is a simulated majority giving the impression that we are many or we are the people we know this this is how it works when right extremist people fill columns trying to make it appear that they have the majority opinion we are not free from being influenced by a perceived majority opinion so that it is being used and of course the imagery of being suppressed and having to resist comes in these people want to kill us with the vaccinations you remember the incident at the petrol station where someone was shot having asked a customer to wear their mask so this is what happens when these statements keep being repeated under the guise of we are the people and we are fighting against it and at the end of the chain we have people that are invited to join more radicalized opinions where they are constantly being bombarded with these messages in these telegram groups you know what I mean and of course you don't tend to be in just one of these groups either I couldn't resist that I suppose very hard so what you have is someone trying to declare that they know the truth in a way that generates a certain effect you divide into a clear and evil scenario and you use scapegoat images and you discredit serious sources and share other media that you want the people to look at you spread fear and of course you offer a solution as well we are the heroes we will fight against the state of fear that you have been implanted into your brain and it's very hard to then work against this constant bombardment and that's how you get drawn in so what are the common features that you see what always happened was the fear scenarios and the attempt to sell certain offering as the solution you link to established concepts and I am offering redemption I can promise you we can put things right which is of course very perfidious but it works you link to established concepts you don't have to do the whole work of coming up with these narratives yourself you use framing to reinterpret reality immunize against criticism and you activate and serve psychological basic needs and you isolate the audience from other sources of influence making it more easy to influence them yourself okay take a breath we have looked at ways of liberties that are inside you that are used by others to connect to you now is this used or can be used and how is it being used in various scenarios that we keep finding on the internet and since we talk about digital manipulation it does play a role on which playing field this whole game is being played the whole internet and social media field is different here it's not the case that there was no manipulation before the internet and no manipulative language propaganda of course has existed for a long time via state media just think back to 1930s or think of the genocide in Rwanda in the early 90s a right-wing extremist used mailboxes to communicate they were always kept good in using current technology to kind of come out from the group that they were and reach out and of course conspiracy myths existed before telegram as well but today's internet makes it much easier for the perpetrators to reach a large target group earlier you would have a lot of effort using radio, tv, print media perhaps there always were gatekeepers and they still exist reach editorial standards you have to have sources and all that so the probability of getting into quality media and reach these target audiences is very low and these days that is no longer necessary everyone can broadcast and broadcasting takes place on all channels constantly which leads to a problem of reaching attention because there are so many channels but in theory everyone can have a large reach in practice of course it depends on certain factors but if I am able to communicate in a way that is matched to the ideological setup of certain groups then in theory everyone can find an audience also because of the lack of gatekeeping also find people that agree with you is of course something that is great but it can be a threat as well because those that are particularly radicalized or particularly dangerous that would be one person in one village perhaps they found it hard to spread because people would always know that they were a small minority because that was the fact what's changed now is that these people can use the internet to find like many people from the other village and so on and connect to these and attain an effect that way and that is what we can see in telegram for example and that is the frightening aspect of it the negative one last but not least our use of the net isn't that great either we consume news largely through social media not always the best kind of sources and if people are if things are then published there and commented there that served the way that social media works which rewards effect if I don't use these patterns people will move on to the next topic so this dynamic doesn't necessarily lead to the information being of high quality and we know about manipulation but of course we assume ourselves to be less easy to be influenced than others and of course all the extreme niches of society are reachable through a few clicks and it's quite easy to get bored and to become curious for something else and as we leave to be harder to be influenced this is where we end up so the conclusion here is network is a playground for manipulative communication like and use this as resource a lot of financial input to reach a large amount of people looking at this you have a list of channels on telegram you can look at here you can see the frequency of the messages you have a constant bombardment of messages in these channels and that all gets to the messenger to the device in my pocket and here we have claims that the bloodbath of butcher was committed by Ukraine this is from facebook and a very nice example of a channel view from telegram where someone asks why are you allowing governments to murder you how many subscribers do you have thousands also and that is not an outlier layer and you have an influencer on the right cheers about the fact that in Germany the obligatory vaccination was not passed in parliament so he is saying how he is happy this person is saying happy they are and asking for money at the same time we were talking about problems a lot now and I don't want to end on a negative note because there is not a huge list of things for you to do but of course there are other things there are things you can do we don't like the feeling of saying well I have weaknesses but we are human we do have and just wishing it away it does not help anything so we have to face the fact that we have vulnerabilities and they are beyond our control and we can go through we can go for a walk and try to run away from everyone who tries to talk to us and run away from every fundraiser but it won't work in the long run and it's good to know that what affects me what am I vulnerable to and what can other people do when talking to me and really focus on these things so what happens if someone addresses us and we notice well they are using these tricks then you can ask yourself is it realistic what they promise are they promising paradise might be unrealistic might they promise that all my personal wishes might become real slightly too good slightly too good to be true what do they want me to do and what would it lead to if I did it always think ahead and who profits am I profiting from this like it's promised but maybe the people talking to me right now do I recognize a pattern we've seen it again again create fear and then offer a solution can I see this pattern again also should make you skeptical also important how do they react if I disagree or if I say I want to think about it so I take a step back maybe I Google do they allow it or do they try to keep me in this social moment where they can influence me because the moment I might become more rational and they know they are gone and those questions might help and what I really find important who is whoever is informed and looks closer you will still be find yourself in these situations but you will stay able to react properly maybe you are interested and you want to see where it leads but you shouldn't do so blindly so if you join them because you want you should stay able to act and to react so now I talked a lot and quickly I hope you could still follow so now a too long didn't read this is what you should know about manipulative communication first we have manipulative vulnerabilities that make us vulnerable populism propaganda and conspiracy myths try to use these vulnerabilities so baited people are in trouble because of this and so is the society as a whole and internet makes this more dangerous but who knows this patterns and can recognize them and that's it from me for now I already see the herald stay safe don't let others punk you now I have to take a sip yeah thank you very much for this run for the speedrun am I muted? nope so thank you very much for this speedrun that was very informative it was very informative very fast yeah sorry and there's a lot of questions so I'll begin oh no I'll just begin how do people begin seeing themselves okay how do people people belonging living in the west themselves start making themselves to the outgroup the evil west evil nato so how can you explain that well I would say the ingroup and the outgroup can differ a lot I can make myself to a small ingroup like a local patriotism group and just because I live in the west and have such an identity I don't have to like the nato or define myself by this ingroup I might also say I live here but I don't like it depending on how I see or judge this concept and also how how I want others to react to me and I see others reacting to me I might want to define myself differently who are the masterminds so for example who is profiting from the image of migration waves that sounds like personal profit but I think personally we have the power layer of parties like the afd a german right wing party who gain personal who gain success who gain votes and funding and they can act because of this it might also be an ideology in my germany the right wing is in power and the right wing extremists are in power and that might be it but maybe it's just personal financial gain how can we handle people who we assume are manipulated well the question is what is manipulated someone who is indoctrinated in a certain direction so I think I answered that so with these conspiracy bubbles in the recent years I hear more and more that I can't talk to my family members anymore they are so deep in the bubble but yeah I would say get professional help because this is this is might be a happy topic but I think it's more realistic to reach them if you have a personal connection to them Karina Nukum and Pia Lombardi I didn't get the second name they have wrote a book about this and they wrote it well for but yeah get help and you have to know this is a difficult problem and it's not on my shoulders alone to get them back but it's a big task you can try but please respect your own limits and yeah small addendum to the question an example I don't want to get vaccinated because I read on Facebook that it's dangerous how do I get those people to think well you could start with the sources well where did you read it who posted that who did they get it quite often usually it's maybe just a meme they saw a meme and nothing more and sometimes there's an article or a video and then you have to check the sources and then you have to check where does it come from so there are a lot of research and articles already debunking such claims and of course what does it mean to you why is it relevant to you are you maybe fearful in general don't you want it dictated from above what's your issue with it do you think that those recruiters that you mentioned are using the methods that you showed because they know about them or just intuitive on an intuitive level well the ICs or the IS they have manuals for the recruiters how to address people what kind of timetable to build for them what links to send to them so I would say it's systematic you mentioned puberty before is there something like a digital puberty this naivety and instability that's disconnected from biological age but just how you handle the medium so adults degrade back I think we need an expert for this I don't think I'm qualified okay the advertisers you mentioned if it's for free you are the product in a way others use standards that we can't transcend yet well is it a standard just like it affects you the mechanism works well everything is free everything is free Facebook and whatever and they profit in a way that a single person cannot transcend and doesn't even want to because they don't understand how it works and how to gain money with metadata they can't imagine because they might I don't know might build walls for a job, for a living and that's something you can see to get money for that and invisible works they are less approachable to people I also think how much energy am I investing and if we check our own everyday life and I would say right here we are in a tech techie group and I bring another topic and say this is very important and there's one aspect in your life you do it right and I now show you how everything you do is bad and you have to change a lot how invested are you in this and we have so many things in our head everyday life and we want to conserve energy and then it's easy to say well it's not that bad those experts what they want I never had a problem with the whatsapp it's okay will be fine and that's of course protecting yourself because we have to conserve our energy and yeah so we always have the same problems okay do these beings only fall back into old habits only look at falls in other people do they just need simple answers well these disturb beings these mechanisms work for all of us work on all of us and the asker maybe might say might already accept that but yeah all of us are susceptible to these mechanisms that's not necessarily a bad person you can still decide to abuse those mechanisms and increase racism for example and that's a conscious decision but just be affected unfortunately we all have that and then of course it's important what else is important what are my morals how do they interact and produce different outcomes okay in this context a question for the community why do we think that our conspiracy ideas like surveillance capitalism are better than others how can we distinguish them or how can we place that in your view well that's a sensible question it proves that we see similar patterns between that that we don't accept in those bottles but then ask is what we do so different and we should be open and ask is it different and hopefully we say well yeah are we based on facts that are properly researched and can it be falsified and do we have the option to say well we were wrong but that moment where you try to figure out and look for evidence for what you already think then you're on the right way and if we are really certain in what we say then we should be open to have it proven or tested next question is in a similar direction do these beings have their own morals or their own opinion and the question already says well probably not but the question is again and that's why psychology might be annoying we don't have 100 people and they are all the same they have tendencies but they all have their own experiences and personality and the group of beings there are those and others just because someone is influenced by those vulnerabilities it doesn't mean that they have no personality it doesn't work like that they have morals all of us are influenceable and the question is what else is there have I learned to be critical when presented with something have I learned that I share my resources or have I learned that it's enough if I focus on myself so different things come together do you use platforms in the Fediverse Macedon no not yet okay I would think we are through time slot is ending soon we will soon open we will now open the breakout room the link is in the schedule sorry I am a bit out of thoughts right now we have time for two or three more things is it digital or analog manipulation resilience that we are talking about well I want to talk about the digital phenomena mostly today because if you are being pedantic you can say it's a general one because the psychology behind it doesn't care if it's analog or digitally it's the same I called it digital manipulation resilience because my playing field is digital space and the digital discourse between about politics and society and I see systemic dangers that is not seen properly yet I don't think I have a problem with you guys here but in society I think it's underrated people think yeah I close the laptop and the problem is gone unfortunately not I'll quote Facebook should be called anti-social media right? yeah I know that I understand it and the thesis is well based well founded there are enough arguments well actually there is nothing anti-social within human interaction because as soon as there is interaction it's social the outcome might not always be nice but well we could also go further and ask where does the name come from where does the word come from and soon we enter twitter debate territory well it's it goes in a direction that the basis is that you think in good or bad or good and evil isn't that in itself going on your knees just to be on eye level and fighting something that is not fightable because it's not possible to fight it so what do you mean with who you want to fight your own opinion well just because something has a different opinion I don't have to fight them it's difficult if you try to sell something as an opinion that is dangerous like like incitement of people but then we are in a criminal area and that's a different thing there are laws for that platforms that have that could just change some systemic policies I would like that and maybe in a breakout room someone could talk a bit more about because I don't know it yet but of course so if they say yeah well it's just another platform but yeah of course in my platform I can just have different rules I can have rules that make it more or less likely that someone burns the house down and if we now have a platform where the rules are better I think that would be an improvement the basic argument I think is that in the Fediverse there are no automatic suggestions following some obscure algorithms yeah that's a good thing of course but the platforms use the algorithms to keep us on the platform to play ads and to get money and now the question is are platforms who don't do that able to self sustain maybe donation based does it work so how much does it cost to remove the attention keeping algorithm if that falls away how much does it cost that's nice I think that's a good ending point