human-meaning

In 2008, economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein published Nudge, arguing that how choices are presented—the "choice architecture"—powerfully shapes what people choose. The book sparked a revolution in policy and became controversial for the same reason: it made explicit what had always been implicit.

In 1988, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman published Manufacturing Consent, a book that laid out how media in free societies can serve propaganda functions without overt censorship. Their argument was counterintuitive. In authoritarian states, propaganda is obvious—state control, censorship, punishment for dissent. In democracies, no such controls exist. Journalists

Edward Bernays was Sigmund Freud's nephew. He took his uncle's insights about the irrational unconscious and turned them into a business model. In 1928, Bernays published a book called Propaganda. The title was not ironic. Bernays believed that mass manipulation was not only possible but necessary—

In 2016, researchers discovered that during the Brexit referendum, over a third of the Twitter conversation was generated by automated accounts. Not humans expressing opinions—software executing influence operations at scale. Computational propaganda is the use of algorithms, automation, and big data to shape public opinion. It's influence

In 2018, researchers at MIT published the largest study ever conducted on the spread of true and false news online. They analyzed 126,000 stories shared by 3 million people over a decade on Twitter. The findings were stark: False news spread further, faster, deeper, and more broadly than true

In 1961, psychologist William McGuire asked a simple question: if vaccines protect against biological viruses by exposing people to weakened pathogens, could the same principle protect against persuasion? His experiments showed that it could. People exposed to weak versions of arguments—and given practice refuting them—became more resistant to