If you have made it through this series, you now know how clickbait is engineered to hijack your emotions, how bots manufacture the illusion of public opinion, how lateral reading can expose a manipulative source in two minutes, and how social media platforms are built to profit from your outrage rather than inform you. That…
Most of us have a mental image of the teenager who barely glances up from their phone, effortlessly navigating five apps at once while carrying on a conversation. We tend to assume that kind of fluency comes with a built-in ability to see through manipulation, spot misinformation, and understand how digital systems actually work. That…
In my previous article “Online Bots: When Accounts Aren’t Who They Seem,” we talked about bots and how manufactured voices can flood the internet with misleading content. But what happens when you actually want to check whether something you found online is trustworthy? For most of us, the instinct is to look more closely at…