Glossary of terms.

The long-standing Russian (and earlier Soviet) doctrine of influencing other countries by means short of war: disinformation, forgery, front organisations, and the amplification of existing social divisions. Online influence operations are this doctrine ported to a new medium — the goal is less to make you believe one specific lie than to corrode shared trust in institutions and in the idea of verifiable fact.

A simple framework given before the detail, into which the detail can then be slotted — Ausubel's idea that you learn complex material better when you first have a mental "map" to hang it on. The plain-language main text (Layer 1) is the advance organiser for this whole site: read it first and the depth blocks have somewhere to attach.

Not disagreeing more about policy, but disliking and distrusting the other side more — coming to see opponents as enemies rather than fellow citizens who are wrong. It is the kind of division that engagement-ranked feeds reward most, because contempt and us-versus-them content travels further than agreement. It corrodes the shared ground democracy needs even when people's actual policy views barely move.

The set of methods for establishing how old a user is — from a typed birthday, which anyone can defeat, through to document checks, facial age-estimation, mobile-operator checks, open banking or a third-party digital identity service. The Online Safety Act does not name a method. It sets a standard of result: under section 12(6), whatever is used must be "highly effective at correctly determining whether or not a particular user is a child". Ofcom's guidance translates that as technically accurate, robust, reliable and fair, and rules out self-declaration. The dilemma is unchanged by the wording: a check strong enough to stop a determined teenager generally has to identify every adult too.

The construction of a predictive model of an individual from the traces they leave — what they click, how long they linger, what they share, who they follow. The profile is not a description you would recognise; it is a statistical object optimised to predict your next action. You never see it, and you cannot correct it.

Zuboff's term for the behavioural data left over after a service has been delivered to you — the click patterns, locations, and timings that aren't needed to run the product, but are captured anyway and fed into prediction. This surplus is the raw material of the business: it is refined into predictions about your future behaviour and sold in markets you never see.

The amount of information working memory is handling at once. Working memory is small and easily swamped; when a page demands more than it can hold, comprehension collapses — the facts "do not land." Cognitive load theory (Sweller) is the basis for keeping the main text spare and pushing detail into optional layers, so the reader chooses when to spend the capacity.

Networks of accounts that hide who is really behind them and act together to make a message look more popular or organic than it is — fake personas, paid amplification, bot-assisted sharing. The term comes from Meta's own enforcement vocabulary. What makes it "inauthentic" is the concealed coordination, not the content itself, which may be true, false, or merely divisive.

Interface designs that steer you toward the choice the company prefers rather than the one you would freely make: the giant "Accept all" button next to a greyed-out, three-clicks-deep "Reject". They exploit defaults, friction, and visual hierarchy. Under the GDPR a consent obtained this way is arguably not freely given — but the banners remain near-universal because the cost of ignoring the rule is low relative to the value of the data.

Representing a group as less than fully human — as vermin, disease, or invaders. It is not just insult: psychologically, it loosens the moral restraints that normally stop people from accepting or committing violence against others. Genocide scholars treat escalating dehumanising language as a recognised warning stage, which is why its mass amplification in Myanmar is documented so carefully rather than dismissed as mere offensive speech.

An influence strategy aimed not at making you support side A over side B, but at making you believe the whole system is rigged and no source can be trusted. It is cheaper than persuasion and harder to counter: you don't have to win an argument, only to exhaust people into disengagement. A population that trusts nothing is easier to rule and harder to mobilise in defence of institutions — which is why corroding trust, not winning votes, is often the actual objective.

A duty to take reasonable steps to prevent a foreseeable harm, rather than a liability for each thing that goes wrong. The Online Safety Act borrows the idea from health-and-safety law: a regulated service must assess the risks its own design creates, and use proportionate systems and processes to reduce them. It is not a duty to be perfect, and it is not a duty about any particular post. That is what makes it hard to verify — the question moves from "was this content removed?" to "were the systems adequate?"

A measure of how big a relationship is, separate from whether it is statistically real. Much of the dispute turns on this: a finding can be highly statistically significant (very unlikely to be chance) and still small in practical terms. Whether social media's measured effect on adolescent wellbeing is "small" or "meaningful at population scale" is a genuine disagreement about how to weigh the same numbers.

The practice of training a ranking system to maximise measurable behavioural signals — clicks, watch time, reshares, comments — used as a proxy for value. The proxy is convenient because it is easy to measure. It is also systematically misaligned with wellbeing: the content that holds attention is not the content that serves you.

Presenting two sides as evenly matched when the evidence is not — giving a fringe view equal airtime with an overwhelming consensus in the name of "balance". It is how a settled question (climate science, vaccine safety) can be made to look like a live controversy. The manufactured-doubt industry exploits it deliberately: you don't need to win the argument, only to make it look unsettled.

A four-step design loop — trigger, action, variable reward, investment — popularised by Nir Eyal in his 2014 book Hooked, written as a manual for building products people return to without thinking. It is a clear, honest description of the machinery, written from the inside. The same author later wrote Indistractable (2019), a book on resisting distraction, which argues that distraction starts from within rather than from the tools. This site's view is that a loop built to be hard to leave is part of the problem.

External examination of how a recommender system actually behaves — what it amplifies, to whom, with what effects — by parties who do not work for the platform. It requires genuine access to data and systems, not the platform's own summary reports. The recurring obstacle is the information asymmetry: the platform knows everything about its system and external researchers know comparatively little, which makes independent verification of any safety claim difficult. Closing that gap is what the DSA's audit and data-access provisions set out to do.

Data you never provided, generated by predicting your attributes from your behaviour — for example inferring a health condition from the articles you read. Under European data-protection law, inferences about you can be personal data, but you rarely know they exist, cannot see them, and cannot easily correct them. The profile that decides what you are shown is one you have no access to.

A term the WHO and UN used during COVID-19 for "an overabundance of information, both online and offline", including deliberate attempts to spread wrong information. The point of the word is the scale and speed: the problem is not that false health claims exist, which they always have, but that the feed distributes them at the velocity of a pandemic.

Building resistance to manipulation by learning the technique in advance — a psychological vaccine. The key finding, from Cambridge's Sander van der Linden and colleagues, is that specific knowledge of the tactics transfers across topics and, refreshed now and then, lasts for months, where vague awareness ("algorithms are manipulative") does not. That gap is part of why awareness alone hasn't protected your generation.

The principle that an online service is not legally liable for content its users create, the way a phone company isn't liable for what people say on calls. It is what lets a platform host billions of posts — and moderate them — without being sued over each one. The hard question Section 230 left unanswered: does that immunity also cover the platform's own choice of which posts to amplify?

Under the GDPR a company may not process your personal data just because it wants to; it needs one of six "lawful bases", the most discussed of which is your freely-given, informed, specific consent. "Freely given" is the catch: consent buried in a pre-ticked box or extracted by a manipulative banner is not valid consent in law — which is why so much enforcement turns on how the choice was designed, not whether a box was clicked.

A study that follows the same people over a long period, measuring them repeatedly, rather than taking a single snapshot. It is the design best able to untangle cause from effect — does the feed worsen mood, or does low mood drive scrolling? — because it can see which came first. Its weakness is time: to know what childhood social media does across a life, you have to wait roughly that long.

Online slang for maximising one's physical attractiveness. "Softmaxxing" covers ordinary grooming and fitness; "hardmaxxing" covers extreme measures. Solea and Sugiura (2025) document how the term, along with the pseudoscientific "PSL" attractiveness scale, is used to repackage misogynist "incel" ideology as neutral self-improvement so it spreads more easily on mainstream platforms.

A strategy, not a state of knowledge: deliberately funding and amplifying contrarian research to make a settled question look unresolved, so that action can be delayed. Oreskes and Conway traced the same small playbook from tobacco to acid rain to climate. The tell is the goal — not to establish a competing truth, but to manufacture enough apparent controversy that "the science isn't settled" sounds reasonable.

The long-standing argument — associated with John Stuart Mill and, in US law, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes — that the remedy for bad speech is more speech, not suppression, because truth tends to win an open contest. It is one of the strongest cases for a light touch. Its critics do not reject it so much as note its hidden assumptions: it pictures a town square of human speakers, not an engagement algorithm choosing what a billion people see. When reach is sold and automated, the "market" is no longer deciding between ideas on their merits.

Aiming a tailored message at a very narrow audience — sometimes individuals — defined by inferred traits rather than broad demographics. In politics, it means different voters see different, individually-optimised appeals that no one else sees, which makes the overall campaign hard to scrutinise or fact-check. Its real-world persuasive power is genuinely debated; its opacity is not.

A US procedure that pools many separate lawsuits making similar claims before a single judge for the shared pre-trial stage — gathering evidence once rather than thousands of times. It is not a class action: the individual cases keep their own identity and can be tried separately. MDL 3047 consolidates the social-media youth-harm suits; its scale (thousands of cases) is itself part of why the litigation is consequential.

The tendency for negative information to produce stronger and faster cognitive, emotional, and physiological responses than equivalent positive information.

The listings a search engine ranks by its own relevance signals, as opposed to paid results, which advertisers buy. On a typical commercial query the paid results sit on top and look much like organic ones. In 2013 the US Federal Trade Commission told search engines that the cues separating the two had "become less noticeable to consumers"; in a 2015 UK survey, only half of search users recognised the ads at the top of a Google results page as advertising.

Consuming a feed without interacting — scrolling, watching, reading, but not posting or messaging. Studies distinguish it from active use (conversation, sharing with people you know). A 2017 review found passive use the form most consistently linked to lower well-being, though this is contested: a 2022 review of 40 survey studies found that most did not support the link. Where it holds, the likely reason is that passive use is mostly upward social comparison with none of the connection that makes social contact restorative.

The finding that averages hide opposite individual realities: a feature that lifts one person's mood lowers another's, so the population average can be near zero while real harms and benefits are large but cancel out. Valkenburg's work argues this is why the "small average effect" debate can mislead — the right question is often for whom, under what conditions, rather than how much on average.

A slang term (from "fattening the pig before slaughter") for a long-game investment fraud: the scammer invests weeks building a genuine-feeling relationship before introducing a fake, high-return investment platform. The trust is the product; the "investment" is the slaughter. Naming the structure matters because, once you know the relationship is the setup, the later pitch loses its power.

Debunking corrects a false claim after it has spread; prebunking teaches the manipulation technique in advance, so students recognise the move whatever specific claim it carries. The advantage is coverage and durability: there are endless false claims to debunk, but a small number of recurring techniques to inoculate against, and technique-level learning transfers across topics.

A branch of law that holds the maker of a product responsible when the product is built in a foreseeably harmful way — independent of anything a user did with it. Applied to platforms, the claim partly sidesteps Section 230: it is not about the content users posted (immunised) but about the company's own engineering choices (not immunised). The related "failure to warn" claim argues the company knew of the harms, from public studies or its own research, and did not warn users.

The AI Act's two main addressees. A provider develops an AI system, or has one developed, and places it on the EU market or puts it into service under its own name. A deployer uses an AI system under its own authority — a company, a school, a public body, a publisher — but not a person using one for a purely personal, non-professional activity. Almost every question about whether a duty applies to you starts here, because the Act gives the two roles different obligations: marking generated output is the provider's job, disclosing that you used it is often the deployer's.

Targeting people by inferred psychological traits — personality, values, anxieties — rather than by demographics like age or location. A controlled study reaching over 3.5 million people found that ads matched to a person's personality produced up to 40% more clicks and up to 50% more purchases than unmatched ads. The same technique that sells running shoes can sell a political message.

The route from ordinary content toward extreme content — often called the "rabbit hole." What is well established is narrower than the name suggests: the platform lowers the cost of finding extreme content and of finding other people who share it, and it serves that material preferentially to people already leaning that way. Whether the recommendations drive the escalation on their own is contested among researchers — the honest version is on the radicalisation page.

The system that auctions each ad slot in the moment a page loads. To run the auction, a "bid request" describing the user — location, inferred interests, identifiers — is broadcast to many potential bidders at once. The privacy problem is structural: the data is shared with every participant in the auction, not only the winner, hundreds of times a day per person. The CJEU's IAB Europe ruling (Case C-604/22) held that the TC String, the consent string at the heart of that framework, is personal data.

The class of algorithms that decide what each user sees. They predict, from your past behaviour and the behaviour of similar users, which item you are most likely to engage with — and rank your feed accordingly. They are the engine of Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.

Crucially, they optimise for predicted engagement, not for accuracy, importance, or your wellbeing. Where those enter the model at all — a classifier that scores a post as likely hate speech, a survey asking users what they found worthwhile — they are adjustments layered on top, not the quantity the system is built to maximise.

The finding, from the 2010s on, that a large share of published results — especially in psychology and parts of medicine — could not be reproduced when independent teams repeated the studies. It sounds like an indictment of science, and partly it is. But replication is itself a scientific method, and the crisis was found, named, and acted on by scientists — which is the self-correction the rest of this section is about, working in public.

A term, taken up by the legal scholar Tim Wu, for silencing speech not by banning it but by drowning it — overwhelming the information space with propaganda, distraction, troll campaigns, and automated content until genuine speech cannot be found or trusted. It is the modern censor's tool precisely because it never has to admit to censoring anything. It also explains why "let everything be said" no longer guarantees anything is heard: when attention is the scarce resource, whoever can manufacture the most noise wins, regardless of truth.

Leon Festinger's 1954 observation that people work out their own worth by measuring themselves against others, and that we reach hardest for comparisons when we are unsure of ourselves. The instinct is normal and useful in a small community. A feed that shows you thousands of carefully curated lives and faces a day turns it into a source of near-constant, mostly unfavourable comparison.

Naomi Eisenberger's fMRI studies showed that social rejection activates the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex — a brain region also active during physical pain. Approval activates the ventral striatum, the same region active when people receive money.

Whether the overlap means shared circuitry or only neighbouring activity is debated among neuroscientists. What the studies agree on is that rejection is felt as something closer to pain than to indifference, and that approval engages the brain's reward regions — which is why a "like" can feel like a small reward.

The tendency to treat other people's behaviour as evidence of what is safe or smart — strongest under uncertainty, and strongest when those people seem similar to us. A scam delivered as an ad is easy to dismiss; the same scam delivered as a tip from someone you follow, or as a crowd of strangers all "winning," bypasses the scepticism an ad would trigger. The endorsement does the persuading.

Accounts run by an operator while posing as an unconnected, ordinary person — a fake "American voter" actually run from a troll farm abroad. At scale, a coordinated network of sockpuppets manufactures the appearance of a genuine grassroots movement (sometimes called "astroturfing"), which is what made the IRA's operation effective: the divisive content looked like it came from real fellow citizens.

The principle in US constitutional law that the Bill of Rights — including the First Amendment — limits what governments may do, not what private parties may do. A consequence many people find counter-intuitive: when a social platform removes your post, it has not violated your First Amendment rights, because it is not the state. The same act by a government would be censorship in the constitutional sense; by a company it is, legally, an editorial choice. This is exactly why the real debate is about private power, not constitutional rights.

Images, audio, or video generated or altered by AI to depict people saying or doing things they did not. The technical barrier has collapsed: a convincing voice clone now needs seconds of sample audio. The significance is less any single fake than the "liar's dividend" — once people know anything could be fake, genuine evidence can be dismissed as fabricated too.

The DSA's central innovation: instead of policing individual posts, it makes the largest platforms responsible for the society-level effects of their systems — harm to elections, civic discourse, public health, fundamental rights. They must assess these risks and mitigate them. It shifts the legal question from "is this post illegal?" to "does the design of this system cause foreseeable harm at scale?"

A reward schedule where the payoff comes after an unpredictable number of tries, rather than every time or on a fixed timetable. In mid-twentieth-century experiments, B.F. Skinner found this schedule produces the most persistent, hardest-to-stop behaviour — which is exactly why slot machines use it. A feed that sometimes rewards a refresh, and a notification that might be something good, run on the same principle. The uncertainty is the hook, not a flaw.

The discipline of confirming a claim against independent evidence before publishing — and being willing to drop a story that won't stand up. It is the single feature that most cleanly separates journalism from propaganda: propaganda is not trying to find out whether something is true, it is trying to produce a reaction. Verification is slow and expensive, which is exactly why engagement-optimised systems route around it.

The DSA's tier for platforms with more than 45 million monthly active users in the EU — roughly a tenth of the population. VLOPs carry the heaviest obligations precisely because their scale makes their design choices a matter of public consequence rather than private business. The Commission, not national regulators, supervises them directly.

Europol's term for criminal networks that outsource violence: those who order and profit from it stay hidden, while the risk is pushed onto recruited operatives — increasingly minors with no criminal record, who are seen as less likely to be caught or to inform. Europol's EU-SOCTA 2025 threat assessment found organised-crime violence intensifying in several member states under a violence-as-a-service model, and the agency set up a dedicated taskforce in 2025 in response.

Berridge and Robinson distinguished two reward systems. "Wanting" (also called incentive salience) is driven by dopamine in the mesolimbic pathway and produces the urge to seek. "Liking" is mediated by opioid systems and produces the experience of pleasure.

The two can be dissociated experimentally. You can want something intensely and not enjoy it when you get it.

A search that ends on the results page — the user gets their answer from a snippet, knowledge panel, or AI summary and never clicks through to a source. Convenient for the user, but it strips away the context that lets you judge an answer: who wrote it, how they're funded, whether they correct mistakes. The search engine becomes the answer rather than a route to one.