Newsletter: Protect Yourself From Disinformation and Conspiracy Theories!
Resisting Manipulation Transcends Language and Culture
This week’s livestream will be tomorrow, Wednesday, August 6th, at 3-4 p.m. EDT. We hope to livestream on YouTube, Substack, and Instagram! I welcome everyone to tune in with questions and comments! Last week’s livestream was a great success; you can see the recording here if you missed it.
I am delighted to announce the impending release of the Spanish translation of my classic book, Combating Cult Mind Control. Now Spanish speakers can benefit from this vitally useful and informative book as Rompiendo el Control Mental de las Sectas, available wherever you buy your books very soon!
Equally exciting news is that the new updated version of my latest scientific surveys is now live! These free, anonymous surveys can help you measure just how much control is in any group, from a country, a workplace, a church, or even a family or relationship. We encourage people to take the survey, even for healthy groups. Especially if you’ve done the study before, these are significantly shorter, and the wording has been changed. In addition, we now ask for feedback specifically on your experience answering both the 20-question and the 40-question surveys. Our aim is that we can eventually collect enough data to create a scientifically robust model of manipulative control. Please set aside a few minutes, go to bitemodel.com, and let us know what you think. And get a number on the Influence Continuum!
In this week’s episode of Cult Conversations: The Influence Continuum, titled “Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity,” I spoke with Professor Sander van der Linden Ph.D., about his book of the same title and about how it is critical in our current world situation to proof ourselves against misinformation, conspiracy theories, and propaganda. He has done research on the effectiveness of thinking about disinformation and conspiracies as a virus. He has developed a game: getbadnews.com, and experience the game he has created that will help you learn how to pre-bunk conspiracy theories. He has created a unique model of “11 antigens” to inoculate oneself against misinformation. You can listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Of course, the video of the interview is on our YouTube channel and is embedded in the Substack post.
In next week’s episode of Cult Conversations: The Influence Continuum, I speak with Evelyn Pérez-Verdia, a leading bilingual political strategist, business owner, and advocate for the Latino community, about the importance of purveying accurate information in all communications. The video of our talk is available in advance for our YouTube members, so now is an excellent time to become a YouTube channel member.
Today I appeared on the Mark Thompson Show Livestream; we discussed my book, The Cult of Trump and also what people can do now to help more people exit. My segment starts at approximately 28 minutes in.
Check out my Psychology Today blog post for the month of July, titled The Psychological Warfare of Parental Alienation. In it, I discuss the thorny problem of parental alienation, which causes lifelong emotional and relational struggles for many adult children, and requires compassion, self-forgiveness, and access to accurate information to overcome.
Finally, I have been invited to speak on Thursday, August 14th, from 6:30 – 8:00 PM at a special free community event, Defending Democracy in Hampden County. The discussion will center around the rise of authoritarian influence in American politics. If you’re in Springfield, Massachusetts, I’d love to meet you and talk with you! It will be streamed on Zoom, plus we plan to stream it live on my YouTube channel, @drstevenhassan!
“Misinformation spreads like a virus,” explained Sander van der Linden, Ph.D., a Professor of Social Psychology in Society and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He asked the question, “Is there a way to inoculate or immunize people?” His award-winning book Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity explores this topic using decades of research and on-the-ground experience advising governments and tech companies. He wrote the book to devise a new paradigm to help readers understand and defend themselves against a worldwide information infodemic.
Read the blog post or listen to the podcast, below:
Family estrangement, the cutting off or distancing of family members from one another, is increasingly recognized as a significant social phenomenon in the U.S. While the causes and forms of estrangement are diverse, a subtype known as parental alienation (PA) exists in which one parent deliberately manipulates a child to unjustifiably reject or fear the other parent, often during high-conflict divorce proceedings or custody battles.
As always, please let us know what you think about these pieces or what you’d like to see us discuss in the future. Thanks so much!
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YOU CAN’T FIRE THE TRUTH
https://open.substack.com/pub/trumpooning/p/you-cant-fire-the-truth?r=4lj96&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true