The emotional battlefield: Inside the tactics manipulating us online
Social media isn’t just distracting us, it’s changing our emotional instincts, and experts warn that the threat to our democracy is rising.
I’ve never been someone with a huge social circle. Partly circumstance, partly choice. So, in my moments of isolation, when I look for connection and a sense of belonging, social media should, in theory, help. Instead, it usually makes everything worse. I’ll open an app hoping to feel less isolated and somehow end up feeling more so, like I’ve joined a party where everyone already knows the in joke. And yet I keep going back.
We all do. It’s not because we’re weak willed, it’s because these systems are designed to tug at the deepest emotional wiring inside all of us.
That’s what pushed me to speak to Professor Alan Jagolinzer, a former U.S. Air Force pilot turned Cambridge information scientist. Jagolinzer convenes an annual summit where experts in their respective fields gather to analyse the spread of disinformation and work together to develop strategies to combat it. If anyone could explain why the search for connection online can often be manipulated, it would be him.
Jagolinzer’s starting point is that whether you’re dealing with a romance scammer, a crypto fraudster, or less-than-honest politician, the emotional mechanics are almost identical. “The patterns of manipulation are actually really similar,” cutting across everything from vaccine denial to authoritarian movements and the slow erosion of democratic norms.
This goes beyond deception, it’s what he calls a “cognitive campaign,” a deliberate attempt to disrupt our ability to think clearly. He first encountered the concept during his time as an Air Force pilot, where psychological operations were framed as strategic tools. Today, he sees the same playbook everywhere, especially online. At the heart of it is an evolutionary vulnerability, which is, our fear of being cast out of the group. Social rejection sometimes registers in the brain as physical pain, and modern manipulators have found ways to weaponize this. Our phones are “black mirrors” that reflect back whatever keeps us engaged, validated, and emotionally hooked. We’re not being tricked because we’re stupid, we’re actually having our deep-seated biological fears exploited because we’re human.
The technology amplifies this dramatically. Jagolinzer pointed me towards research showing that with just a couple of hundred Facebook “likes,” algorithms can predict your entire personality as accurately as your partner. That assumes you’re interacting with real people. Increasingly, you’re not. AI bots, he warned are “wired to be sycophantic,” telling users exactly what they want to hear. In that moment, you’re not chatting with a digital companion, you’re “interacting with the owners of the platform who created the bot,” and whose terms and conditions allow them to use your data however they choose.
These tactics can deploy at any scale, creating what Jagolinzer describes as “synthetic communities,” networks of fake personas designed to mimic grassroots groups. Investigations in Scotland have already uncovered AI-generated accounts posing as local voters to influence public discourse. The investigation co-operative, The Ferret exposed ‘human-made’ bot networks that used AI-generated Scottish personas to fight the disposable vape ban. To be clear these weren’t real voters, nor were they real people; they were a ‘false majority’ manufactured by PR firms and fringe parties to hijack the democratic conversation. Jagolinzer points to “information fatigue” as a primary weapon of modern-day manipulators, where the ultimate goal is to make the public “lose faith in the entire system” until they simply “shut down even trying.”
You may not believe the lie, but you’re too exhausted to care about the truth. So, what can we do in our day-to-day life to fight against this? Easy in principle but perhaps less so in practise. When seeing something online are you able to pause before reacting, take time to notice whether the post is pulling at your fear, outrage or belonging. Also try to check the source, person, bot, or community that may be behind it, granted this will become increasingly difficult as time goes by. Perhaps an even healthier alternative is to reconnect offline – with real people! After all, real conversations are the best antidote to manufactured ones.
This isn’t about outsmarting the machines; it’s about understanding the emotions they’re designed to exploit and making sure that we future proof ourselves for whatever types of digital manipulation come calling soon.
Tom Mitchell-Sadler has contributed this piece as part of the Future Proof initiative, a youth-led digital project tackling misinformation and disinformation to help young voters cast their ballots wisely
Scotsman Political Correspondent, Rachel Amery, will be answering questions online about the campaign and any signs of misinformation or social media manipulation in the campaign so far in a special Future Proof webinar tomorrow, Friday 17th April at 1230. You can sign up to take part here https://bit.ly/FutureProof2026
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