Misguided: The Podcast

In this episode of Misguided: The Podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Cecilie Steenbuch-Traberg, a professor at the Copenhagen Business School who studies how social context shapes our susceptibility to misinformation, and what interventions actually work to counter it. Cecilie’s path into the field took a detour through marketing before she found her true passion: not trying to persuade people, but protecting them from being persuaded.
We start by talking about how the classic pre-bunking games (like Bad News and Harmony Square) hold up when you test them in more realistic social conditions. The short answer is that they mostly work, but people are still vulnerable to the surrounding social cues: who’s sharing something, how many likes it has, whether the source feels politically similar to you. Even a handful of comments can make a fringe belief feel like consensus. That gap between individual-level learning and real-world social context is where Cecilie sees the biggest unmet need.
From there, we dig into her new project, Solomon’s Secret: a murder mystery game designed to teach social influence literacy without ever announcing that it’s a misinformation game. The goal is to reach people who would never seek out a media literacy tool, by making the learning feel incidental to the fun. We also connect this to some of my own research comparing pre-bunking games across cultural contexts.
We close by discussing how AI is reshaping both the threat and the opportunity. AI can certainly be used as a tool for scaling manipulation, but it can also help personalize interventions in ways that weren’t previously possible.
You can listen to the full episode here or via the links below. As always, if you find it useful, feel free to share it with someone who might benefit from the conversation.
Follow Cecilie on LinkedIn
Cecilie’s website
Cecilie’s Google Scholar
Solomon’s Secret
Keywords: Cecilie Steenbuch Traberg, prebunking, media literacy, AI, social influence, psychological inoculation, social media, psychology
Misguided: The Podcast - Apple Podcasts
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Misguided - YouTube


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Here is my live video chat with Mike Nellis as a bonus podcast episode. I really enjoyed our conversation about the social psychology of why we believe false information, and how we can strengthen our media literacy through strategies like critical ignoring. We also discussed the broader structural and platform-level challenges that make today’s information environment so difficult to navigate.


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In this episode of Misguided: The Podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Steve Rathje, who is a social psychology postdoc at NYU, and a soon-to-be assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Steve’s work sits at the intersection of psychology, social media, and artificial intelligence. Steve studies how platform design, attention, and emerging technologies shape political polarization, belief formation, and online behavior.
We begin by talking about Steve’s non-traditional path into psychology, which started in theater before turning into a research career focused on how people think, feel, and behave online. From there, we dig into some of his most influential work on social media, including why posts that target political outgroups are often the most likely to go viral, and what that reveals about algorithms that reward outrage, mockery, and conflict.
We then explore more hopeful findings from Steve’s research on unfollowing hyper-partisan influencers, showing how small, targeted changes to people’s information diets can reduce out-party hostility over time without requiring users to leave social media altogether.
Finally, we turn to AI chatbots and Steve’s recent experiments on “sycophancy”—when AI systems become overly agreeable. We discuss how affirming chatbots can quietly increase belief certainty and extremity while still being perceived as warm, competent, and unbiased, and what this means for confirmation bias, persuasion, and the future design of AI systems.
You can listen to the full episode here or using the links below. As always, if you find it useful, feel free to share it with someone who might benefit from the conversation.
Follow Sander on TikTok, Instagram, Bluesky or LinkedIn
Steve’s website with links to his research papers
Keywords: Steve Rathje, virality, AI chatbots, polarization, social media, psychology, science communication, TikTok
Misguided: The Podcast - Apple Podcasts
Misguided: The Podcast | Podcast on Spotify
Misguided - YouTube


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit matthewfacciani.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of Misguided: The Podcast, I’m joined by Sander van der Linden, who is a professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge and one of the leading researchers studying misinformation, propaganda, and how people can build resistance to manipulation. If you’re familiar with the idea of “prebunking,” or psychological inoculation (training people to recognize misinformation before they encounter it), much of that work traces back to Sander’s research.
We begin by talking about his non-traditional path into psychology, from leaving a banking job to discovering research as a career, and how early experiences with being misled sparked a deeper interest in influence and propaganda. From there, we dig into what psychological inoculation actually is, why simply giving people facts often isn’t enough, and how tools like the Bad News game help people recognize manipulation techniques across political and cultural contexts.
We then zoom out to the broader information ecosystem, including the economics of fake social media accounts and how cheap it has become to spread inauthentic activity at scale, especially in an age of AI. Finally, we discuss what effective responses might look like, from education and platform responsibility to why Sander remains cautiously optimistic despite the very real challenges ahead.
You can listen to the full episode here or the links below. As always, if you find it useful, feel free to share it with someone who might benefit from the conversation.
Follow Sander on Bluesky or LinkedIn
Sander’s Book: Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity
Sander’s website.
Cambridge Online Trust and Safety Index
Keywords: Sander van der Linden, prebunking, media literacy, AI, fake accounts, foolproof, psychological inoculation, social media, psychology
Misguided: The Podcast - Apple Podcasts
Misguided: The Podcast | Podcast on Spotify
Misguided - YouTube


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In this episode of Misguided, I’m joined by Renee DiResta to talk about how she went from a winding career in tech, finance, and Silicon Valley startups to becoming one of the leading analysts of online influence. Renée traces the shift back to a personal moment: after having her first child in 2013, she noticed a concerning amount of anti-vaccine content across Facebook communities. She started quietly studying those communities and doing network analysis at night, work that eventually became her full-time focus.
We spend a lot of time on a core idea from her book Invisible Rulers “bespoke realities.” Renée argues that blaming everything on “the algorithm” misses what truly pulls people into false worlds. Algorithms may guide people toward certain groups, but it’s the communities themselves—identity, belonging, alternative experts, and self-contained information loops—that keep people inside and make outside institutions seem corrupt or irrelevant.
From there, we turn to AI. Renée sees chatbots and answer engines as the next major force in shaping reality. As more people skip searching and instead ask a preferred bot for the truth, the information battle moves upstream to the training and reference layer of the internet (especially Wikipedia). Influence those sources, and you can influence what AI confidently repeats back.
Finally, we talk about why scientific and medical institutions keep losing ground online. They’re limited by incentives, risk-averse cultures, and a decade-long “network debt” compared to misinformation influencers. Renée’s conclusion is direct: if institutions want to stay relevant, they need to show up where people actually are, build genuine relationships in communities, and treat communication as central to their mission, not a side task or liability.
Follow Renee on Threads
Follow Renee on Bluesky
Renee’s Book: Invisible Rulers
Renee’s articles mentioned during this episode:
For Expertise to Matter, Nonpartisan Institutions Need New Communications Strategies
Source Wars and Bespoke Realities: Wikipedia, Grokipedia, and The Battle for Truth
Free Speech Is Not the Same As Free Reach
Keywords: Renee DiResta, social networks, vaccine attitudes, AI, misinformation, AI chatbots, bespoke realities, invisible rulers
Misguided: The Podcast - Apple Podcasts
Misguided: The Podcast | Podcast on Spotify
Misguided - YouTube


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit matthewfacciani.substack.com/subscribe