Love, Lies & Likes with Dr. Nicola Fox Hamilton

In this episode of the Entropy podcast, host Francis Gorman speaks with Dr. Nicola Fox Hamilton, a cyber psychologist, about the complexities of online dating, the impact of technology on communication, and the darker aspects of digital interactions, including sextortion and misinformation. They explore the psychological implications of smartphone use, the role of AI in modern communication, and the rise of extremist ideologies in the digital age. Dr. Fox Hamilton emphasizes the need for further research in these areas as technology continues to evolve.

Takeaways

• Online dating can be a mixed experience, requiring resilience.
• People use dating apps for various reasons beyond romance.
• Women often face more harassment on dating platforms than men.
• Sexting can be a normal part of sexual development but poses risks.
• Sextortion is a growing problem, particularly for young people.
• Smartphone addiction is not a clinical diagnosis but can lead to problematic use.
• AI can influence how people interact and perceive reality.
• Misinformation often spreads through mainstream media and social media.
• The Manosphere promotes harmful ideologies that can lead to radicalization.
• Understanding the psychology behind online behavior is crucial for addressing these issues.

Sound Bites

• "It's not always the most fun experience."
• "There's a lot that people can get out of it."
• "It's a crime to share those images."
• "It's definitely a problem."
• "It's a much more empowering way."
• "We can no longer trust our eyes."
• "It was a really nice conversation."

Transcript

Francis Gorman (00:01.629)
Hi everyone, welcome to the Entropy podcast. I'm your host, Francis Gorman. I hope you're enjoying our content. If you are, please take a moment to like and follow the show wherever you get your podcasts from. Today's guest is a cyber psychologist who earned her PhD researching how people present and sometimes disguise themselves online. She's a lecturer in applied psychology and cyber psychology at the Institute of Art Design and Technology. She also co-hosts the podcast In Bits with Dr. Liam Chandler. So I'm delighted to be joined today by Dr. Nicola Fox Hamilton.

Nicola, how are you keeping today?

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (00:31.915)
I'm well thanks. Thanks for having me on.

Francis Gorman (00:33.919)
It's great to have you on Nicola. And I think it's a fascinating field, cyber psychology. And I've been listening to your podcast. I know you've had some great insights on the online dating space and the different personas we may adopt in that area. Have you any insights for our listeners, maybe thinking about joining one of those apps? I personally have zero experience. I met my wife at a Greyhound racetrack back in

back in the day, I never had the privilege of swiping left or right on any of these technologies that are out there now.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (01:08.654)
I've never swiped left or right myself because I met my husband pre Tinder and those dating apps, but I'd started doing my research when they launched and they kind of messed with it a bit. So advice, I think you should expect to need to be resilient going into it. It's not always the most fun experience. However, it is the most common way that people meet now. So it's obviously successful for a lot of people and it works.

It doesn't mean it'll work right away. A lot of people spend quite a lot of time on dating apps. They take breaks from it because it's like I said, not always the best experience, but it can work and it can be successful. And I think it depends, you know, what your mindset is going into it and what you're hoping to get out of it. So people date online for a lot of different reasons. We think that it's just because they're looking for a romantic partner or for sex. But there's a lot of other reasons that people date online. There's a more they can get out of it.

So a lot of people, you obviously meet people through dates and you might not feel romantically attracted to them, but you might make new friends that way, particularly people who don't know a lot of people in the area with them. That's a good way to make friends, particularly for the LGBTQ plus community. It's a really good way to build community. People also often get some self validation, self esteem boosts from it. Like if you are say out of a long term relationship and you're not sure if people find you attractive anymore.

You might go on online dating and get matches and feel good because of that. So there's a lot that people can get out of it. There's a lot of positives from it, but also it can be a bit of a negative experience, particularly for women, but kind of just for a lot of people. It's not great. think men and women have different experiences for different reasons. Men's kind of worst experience and anxiety is around the fact that maybe a lot of people don't reply to them and don't match with them because women tend to be pickier about who they match with.

They only match with people they're interested in and they only reply to people that they're interested in. Whereas men tend to match with a lot of people. And so it looks like they're not getting a lot of matches in return. They tend to filter later when someone expresses interest. They're like, actually, I'm not that interested. So there's just a different process that we go through. And then women get an awful lot more harassment, abuse, like someone just keeping contacting them after they've said they're not interested. Sexual images and messages like right off the bat sometimes first thing you get.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (03:29.39)
you match with somebody and they send a picture that you did not ask for, did not want. So there are some negatives that come with it for sure. But if you go in kind of knowing that and kind of understanding that the atmosphere isn't always great, you can actually get some positive things out of it as well.

Francis Gorman (03:47.956)
That's really insightful, especially when you're talking about the pictures you do not want piece. I know there's that phenomenal and there's the revenge porn and all of the dangers that come with that lens on it. For parents of teenagers, et cetera, using these apps, is there a certain danger that they can take an action or send an image or something that they regret and then it's within those digital platforms like...

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (03:56.418)
Yeah.

Francis Gorman (04:16.351)
they've almost given away a level of autonomy that they have no control over now. From a psychological perspective, what do you think the drivers are there? Why do people feel the need to do that in the first place? Especially when it's not asked for, as you said.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (04:29.876)
Especially when it's not asked for. Yeah, it's very different. The drivers for doing it when it's not asked for versus when it is asked for. So when it's not asked for, surprisingly, so a lot of people would have thought that it's about making somebody else feel bad that like that men. So it's primarily men sending images to women that are unsolicited. People would have thought that it was about

that they understood that women didn't like these. And so they're sending it as a form of control or to elicit disgust or a reaction. But actually, the vast majority of men think women will be excited to receive them. So they're not necessarily malevolent in the way they're sending them, but they are delusional because women do not like to receive them unsolicited. And particularly when you've just matched with someone and there's no indication that this is going to happen.

But they think it's maybe a good mating strategy that someone will send pictures in return or hook up with them that they feel excited about sending them. They would be excited if women sent an image to them within the gay community. It's a little different. It's a little bit more acceptable. That doesn't mean everybody finds it acceptable, but it is a bit more acceptable. So men do feel excited to receive these images oftentimes. But women, aside from a vanishingly tiny percentage of women, absolutely do not and would prefer not to be sent them. But within a consensual relationship,

in terms of sexting, whether it's teenagers or adults, it can be very consensual. It can be a very normal part of sexual development for teenagers. You know, with the development of technology, obviously, the way that young people are expressing their sexuality has changed a bit. And there's not something necessarily wrong with that. The problem is when someone shares an image that was not meant to be shared and that was only intended for them. And

Like there has been a lot more awareness building around the fact that it is in Ireland. It's a crime to share those images. So if you're sharing something without consent, that is now crime under Coco's law. But a lot of boys have got around that by, you know, showing the image on the phone to their friends rather than sending it to their friends. So there's no evidence that it's been shared, but sometimes it still is being shared. And of course, there's loads of boys who aren't doing that, who are very respectful of their partners. Sometimes when the relationship breaks down, that's when it gets shared.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (06:44.386)
And that can cause really significant distress for a lot of young people. I think there's a perception that all young people are doing this and actually it's a much smaller percentage than you might think they're doing it. But certainly girls get a lot more pressure to do it than boys. They get a lot of pressure from friends, from boyfriends, et cetera, to share nudes. And they don't always necessarily want to. And sometimes the idea that everybody's doing it makes them feel like they have to when actually there's maybe sort of in around 20, 25 percent actually only do that within relationships.

So it's not everybody that's doing it at all.

Francis Gorman (07:17.407)
very interesting. was doing a bit of research last year when I was building a course for cybersecurity for parents and one of the key parameters in that course is around sextortion. And, you know, do you know who you're talking to, the far side of the wire, basically? And using AI, I was able to, you know, build a character of a young girl to lure in.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (07:28.962)
Mm-hmm.

Francis Gorman (07:40.948)
you know, potential male counterparts in a hypothetical scenario. I wasn't out actually, you know, creating a cry, but it was to show how easy it is to synthesize an individual that doesn't actually exist, that looks attractive, that is almost a honeypot for young men and vice versa. You could do it for young women.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (07:42.338)
Yeah.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (07:47.744)
Yes.

Francis Gorman (08:05.971)
but you don't actually know the person that's behind the image. And you can have multiple scenarios of that synthetic being at different events, doing different things. It's very easy now with artificial intelligence. How big of a problem do you think that predator piece is online and sextortion is within Ireland specifically? know it's well documented in the States and other larger countries, but is it also a problem within Ireland?

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (08:08.076)
Yeah.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (08:16.589)
Yeah.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (08:33.166)
It's definitely a problem. It's very hard to know what the numbers are because a lot of people are too ashamed or embarrassed to actually report it. So a lot of people keep it to themselves and never say anything. I would always encourage someone to report it to the Gardaí because unless we have an idea of how much of a problem it is, it's harder to tackle. And the more data they can collect about who is doing it, the better. It's oftentimes someone that's not in Ireland. It's quite difficult to stop it when it's outside the jurisdiction. But

It definitely is a problem. I've heard of multiple people that this is happening to, whether it's young men, older men. Sex extortion tends to happen more to men than women. Women tend to be more the focus of romance scams, but it happens to women as well. One of the things that can happen, particularly with younger women in their teens, is that someone will steal someone else's identity. So they'll pretend to be a boy that they like.

and try to get them to share nudes, topless photos, things like that, by pretending to be someone that is interested in them. So it's usually not a stranger that young women would share with because they'd be more cautious of that. Although, of course, it can happen, but it might be someone pretending to be someone they know. And then they'll often share those images around. It'll be a form of bullying and so on. So it's definitely a problem, but this extortion for young men and for men of any age is is definitely a problem in Ireland and quite a substantial problem, I think.

And a lot of people do pay over some money. And that only means that it's going to continue. As soon as you pay some money, they'll keep asking for more money because they know that they've got you then. And most of the time, if you don't pay any money and you're reported, nothing will happen. Of course, occasionally something does happen where they share the images. But the vast majority of the time, nothing actually does happen, thankfully.

Francis Gorman (10:21.183)
it's good to know as well as that nothing does happen eventually on these things. There's a piece here that I kind of want to pivot into, get away from some of the some of the darkness and focus on some of the other aspects of of the world we live in and it's smartphone addiction and smartphone use, specifically within the younger generation and the impact that's having

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (10:33.474)
Mm-mm.

Francis Gorman (10:50.577)
on schools and all. I know I recently heard of someone on my network where their kid was attending the leave-in search turned up 15 minutes late for a two o'clock exam because they slept out. And the reason they slept out is because they were on their mobile device till the wee hours of the morning, essentially. Is smartphone addiction eroding our ability to interact on a day-to-day basis?

for some parts of society.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (11:23.746)
There's a number of questions wrapped up in that. Good bit to unpack there. So let's start with the idea of smartphone addiction. There's no such clinical entity as smartphone addiction. So the DSM, which is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders, is the book of disorders. And there is another one for the European psychological. Sorry, let me start that again. There's no clinical disorder.

of smartphone addiction, social media addiction, anything like that. They are not listed in any of the manuals for naming all of the disorders with the clinical indications of them. So it's not a thing that has been shown to exist in the research. is, there are a number of scales that measure smartphone addiction and social media addiction and so on. They are not clinical scales. A lot of them are not very good. They don't actually measure anything problematic. They just measure people doing something a lot.

Like I read a lot. would not call that an addiction, even though sometimes it gets in the way of my life because I want to finish a really good story. But we don't pathologize it in the same way that we do with smartphone use. But what sometimes people have is problematic use. And that might be where it displaces other activities that are important, like in that example, sleep or physical activity or, you know, your relationships with people or your work, college, study, etc.

And if it's displacing things in a significant way that's impacting on your life, then you might have some problematic usage that you need to change and work at maybe making it more of a better solution for you. I think when we look at it as addiction, we have a whole episode on this, the way, because it's a really big topic. When you look at something like smartphones and you or social media and you call it an addiction, it's very disempowering.

So when you think about addictions like alcohol addiction, drug addiction, the only real solution is stop doing that thing completely and stay away from it. We can't do that with technology and it's a very, it doesn't leave any options really for people to deal with it. Whereas if you look at it as a problematic habit or a bad habit, I'm not saying habits are easy to change at all. I know they are not because of the way that I sometimes don't go to the gym.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (13:37.102)
or the way that I don't always eat the best diet. habits are something that we can change over time and we can make efforts to change over time. And it's a much more empowering way that gives you autonomy over your choices and some control over what you're doing. And so I think that's that's a more appropriate way to look at it.

Some people have more difficulty with their phone use than others. So people with ADHD, for example, might find it distracts them much more easily than other people and that they go down rabbit holes and they get lost in it. And so they might need more help with controlling it than other people. In terms of how our phone use and technology use and social media use, etc. affects our interactions with people, in particular for young people, there's no evidence that it's making them any less good at communicating with other people.

You know, this kind of societal discourse about how they're spending all their time on their phones and they're never talking to anyone. And yet they're spending seven or eight hours a day in school, literally face to face with their peers and their teachers. The vast majority of their waking day is spent face to face talking to people. So there is no evidence at all that they're any less good at that. I used to go home from school and spend, you know, I'd walk home from school, my friends, I'd spend an hour chatting to them at the side of the road. I'd go home and then I'd call them on the phone and I'd spend.

two hours talking to them on the phone until my parents kicked me off the phone. Now they're going home and they're spending time connecting on social media, chatting through WhatsApp, etc. It's not necessarily a poor way to communicate. It enables them to stay in contact with a lot more people. For kids who are more isolated, who maybe don't live near their friends, it allows them to stay in contact with them better. So there's benefits that can come from it. It's not necessarily bad. We tend to pathologize this behavior because it's not what we did when we were young.

And we pathologize the whole thing rather than looking at it and saying, well, what are they getting out of it? And what maybe isn't serving them so well and what could we be helping them do a little bit better with?

Francis Gorman (15:32.96)
I like that reframing of habit from an addiction. That actually isn't something that I've come across before in terms of looking at the problem. I think it is an interesting way of framing it because it is habitual. It is something like everyone...

You you walk out house with your car keys, your mobile phone. There are two things you do to tap check for in the mornings when you're going out the door. I do find myself, depending on the applications that are on the phone as well, can have quite a difference in what pulls you in. So I only have one app on my phone that allows notifications. That's LinkedIn. And that's because...

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (15:56.035)
Mm-hmm.

Francis Gorman (16:17.105)
A lot of the guests on this podcast contact me through LinkedIn, et cetera. So if somebody sends me a message and I have a timeframe where I have the retention, I don't want to miss it to get it back. But the downside of that is LinkedIn then always wants you on the app. So it'll send me nonsense of, know, someone has just said this thing and it'll actually come true as a notification. And it's normally automatically after you cancel the app, it starts to try to pull you back into it.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (16:20.461)
rice.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (16:34.71)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (16:40.15)
I know.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (16:46.018)
Yeah.

Francis Gorman (16:46.843)
So you kind of do have to face down the phone and forget about it in those scenarios. And when you talked about, you spend your day in school and then you used to go home and call your friends. That's a really interesting topic because I would have been very similar. And I often use this analogy and I may have said it on the show before, but when you used to call your friends, there was two things that used to have to happen. You used to have their number memorized. So you type type it into the phone.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (17:13.336)
Mm-hmm.

Francis Gorman (17:15.219)
And then you have to do the vetting conversation with your parents. So their parents knew who they were listening to. So you'd have to go, is Chris at home? Chris' mom. And she'd go, Francis, how are you today? You'd have to do the informal conversation there. And then when your friend would come on the phone, you hear a click upstairs. When mommy put the phone to ear to eavesdrop, a man in the middle attack. So parents always knew, I suppose, who their friends.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (17:19.703)
Yeah.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (17:24.425)
Yeah.

Francis Gorman (17:42.1)
Who their children's friends were, what they were talking to. It may not have been fantastic for privacy, I'm not advocating for parents to spy on their children's conversations. But the point I'm making is there was more social interaction in terms of having to interface with different levels of generation. So you'd have to talk to the older generation as well as your own generation and establish communication that you can.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (17:44.461)
Mm.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (17:48.238)
Mm.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (18:00.782)
Mm.

Francis Gorman (18:06.999)
You had to talk to Chris's mom before you talked to Chris because she was the gatekeeper to Christie. And if you wanted that conversation. I do think there is we've changed and we have adopted technology, but we may have eroded some of our social skills as part of it. And you see it in the workplace. Sometimes people will let a problem elongate without picking the phone up. And I think that's just they're not used to having to pick the phone up and kind of go, I have a problem. How do we move things forward? So it's a

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (18:08.43)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (18:28.002)
Mm.

Francis Gorman (18:36.103)
It's definitely an interesting, I suppose, perspective that has arisen from the use of technology. Technology isn't going anywhere. Have you got any views on, from a psychological perspective, how artificial intelligence is playing a role? I've been looking at this space quite a lot over the last two years, and every time I come across the odd scenario where, you know, woman marries AI for...

some reason because it's fulfilling or a man has a friend he spends all day speaking to or whatever it is. Is the new way that we're interacting in prompt and response that AI has given us probably with the burst of open AI in the last couple of years, has that changed the psychology of how we see these technologies in any way?

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (19:04.652)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (19:33.198)
There's, it's not an area that I'm as familiar with, but I am a little familiar with it. For a small percentage of people, they interact with it as though they are talking to someone, but it is a very, very small percentage of people. And it's funny you mentioned those, you know, kind of unusual cases where a woman marries AI or whatever.

If you go back through history and look at newspapers, was a man marries his dog, woman marries her favorite doll and stuff. There were always these slightly edge cases that were really unusual. And I think you're seeing that a bit with AI now. I think what's interesting about it is that for a very, very small subsection of the population, the way that it interacts with them, it feeds back what they are looking for to them and it doesn't

push back at all. So particularly with the newest version of OpenAI, was designed to be more affirming in its reactions. And there's been, you know, a number of news articles written about people who are getting a God complex from it and feeling like they understand everything in the world because the AI keeps telling them that everything they say is right. And so we're seeing the effects on the psychology of people who interact with this technology when a little tweak means that it is a little more affirming in how it responds to people.

affect psychology quite a lot. I think most people understand very, very clearly that they are interacting with something that's basically a chat bot. They understand very clearly what's going on there. They're not forming a relationship with us, but it's more of an intuitive way to interact and to bounce ideas and things like that. I think it's really interesting because someone said, and I can't remember who it was, but I thought it was a really good way of looking at AI. AI can never be creative.

because it can only take what has already been input and make predictions on what already happened. So it can never give you anything new. It might help you look at something differently, perhaps, if you ask it questions, but it's never generating any new ideas, any new thoughts, any creative ideas, creative art, anything like that. So there's huge limitations to it. And I think people don't necessarily realize that they think it's being creative sometimes when it's not. But I think that idea that, you know, suddenly because of

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (21:48.504)
these chatbots, very sophisticated ones, that people are going to stop talking to each other and just start talking to this. I don't think that's the case. We are very hardwired for connection and belonging, and most people want to connect with other people. And so I don't see this as being a societal problem that's going to be a huge issue. I think you are going to get a few people who are maybe very, very lonely, very cut off, who get caught up in talking to this as if it's something real.

But I think we would have seen that expressed in a different way for those people before AI.

Francis Gorman (22:21.967)
fair. It's fair. Fair comment.

I have to ask what attracted you to psychology and specifically cyber psychology? It's I think the first time I ever heard of cyber psychology was Dr. Mary Aiken, you know, when when she first on the stage and then there was CSI cyber, which I was addicted to for a short period. It was on and just just because it was a whole different perspective on a world that I was familiar with, but from a whole different lens. What attracted you into the field and what are the key areas?

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (22:47.31)
Mm.

Francis Gorman (22:54.867)
that you still believe haven't been untapped in terms of our psyche and how cyber plays a role in it.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (23:00.884)
Mm. God, there's so many like it's such a vast field with so many different areas in it. And then technology is always changing. there's so much that we have barely scraped the surface of and then technology changes. We're trying to catch up with that. What got me interested in. So I am not a psychologist. I didn't come from a psychology background at all. I was originally a graphic designer who ended up working in advertising. And when the Celtic tiger crashed, I'd been back from L.A. for about a year.

And I wanted to change direction. got laid off and I wanted to change direction and went and did the master's in cyber psychology. And that was accidental, an accidental twist of fate. I went into the open day in IDT looking for to talk about the digital media masters and overheard Dr. Gronny Kieran talking about the cyber psychology masters and just thought that sounded far more interesting. So I went down that route and I absolutely loved it.

It was the first cyber psychology masteries in the world. So it started in 2007. I did it in 2009 to 11. And actually, Mary Aiken was in the class with me as the two of us were fairly new to the scene at that time. But it's such a fascinating area because it encompasses so much. So my particular area of research that I got into during the master's and then in my PhD was actually online dating and.

how we see other people, how we present ourselves on dating, how we talk about ourselves, how much that expresses who we are, whether we're able to express who we are and whether other people are able to perceive that accurately. That was what my research was on. And then since then, I've looked at people's experiences of online dating during COVID and the lockdowns and so on. But what I'm really like, there's so many areas that I'm so interested in. Obviously, some areas come and go a little bit as society changes, misinformation and disinformation.

and radicalization and conspiracy theories are all areas that I find really interesting now for very obvious reasons, I think, when you look at the state of society, in particular, what's happening in America and the UK and the kind of rise of extremist views and radicalized views. And obviously that's exacerbated by misinformation. I think there's

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (25:11.658)
a lot of stuff around young people and technology that when you're in this area, it's hard to ignore it because it comes up so often. We're asked about it so often. I think stuff like the Manosphere, the incels, all of that kind of stuff is very, very interesting and a little bit worrying. I always find it fascinating why people behave the way they do online, like the kind of trolling harassment, what's underlying that.

we can stop it, what are effective ways to stop that, all of that kind of stuff is really interesting. The newer areas I think that deserve a lot more attention are things like AI, algorithms, what algorithms are pushing to people, what effects that's having on people, how is it kind of, it intersects with misinformation and radicalization I think there, you know, what is people's experience.

when this kind of content starts getting pushed to them, how do they go down a rabbit hole? What kind of content appeals to people and why? are their vulnerabilities? How can we protect them against that? And AI is, I think, big part of that as well. I think AI and cybersecurity is a huge area that's going to be absolutely massive over the next god knows how long, decades.

because it's going to make the scams far more sophisticated, more widespread. It's easier to spread them to a lot of people and personalize them through AI. It's easier to create fake voices, fake videos, et cetera, that will be very compelling and people won't be able to tell what's real or not. And I think that that general thing about like we used to be able to trust our eyes and the fact that that is no longer true and is going to become less and less true over the next number of years.

is concerning and that deserves, I think, a lot of research as well. There's a lot. There's a lot to look at.

Francis Gorman (27:04.095)
There is a lot. actually love that phrase. We can no longer trust our eyes. That paints a stark picture in and of itself. It's, yeah, what you see may not actually be reality. It's all an illusion. And you touched on, you touched on two pieces there that I'd like to unpack, specifically the misinformation, disinformation you talked about America. know, obviously what we're seeing in America at the moment is both fascinating and terrifying, all in the one we're seeing.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (27:09.014)
Yeah, it does.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (27:25.838)
Mm.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (27:30.926)
Mm.

Francis Gorman (27:33.88)
billions of dollars wiped off companies from social media exchanges and, you know, mass protests, just spurring up with a lot of hatred and a lot of misinformation being stated by the government and others, which is surprising. You see, as of today, Israel attacking Iran's nuclear facilities. You'd ask if that was more stable in America, would...

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (27:48.867)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (27:56.952)
Yeah.

Francis Gorman (28:02.099)
Would that knife edge be materialized now? So we're in a very politically charged world where information as a weapon is becoming a primary tool. So I wanna touch on that a little bit. And you also talked about Manosphere and incels and I'm assuming the Andrew Tate type behavior in the recent BBC show that kind of brought this to light from the child perspective, effective upwards.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (28:08.451)
Yeah.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (28:19.214)
Mmm.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (28:26.488)
Yeah.

Francis Gorman (28:29.959)
seems to be a really dark area of technology. And you kind of alluded to people are living two different lives. The person you see walking on the street and the person they become when they hit the keyboard or the smartphone. Would you be able to just maybe touch a little bit on the misinformation piece and then we can pivot into the the manuscript in cell aspects and what you're seeing in that area.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (28:40.056)
Hmm.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (28:49.888)
Yeah. Yeah. So misinformation is obviously a huge problem. What a lot of the research shows is that the most influential misinformation actually comes from mainstream media and political elites. So the fact that a lot of mainstream media, particularly in America, if look at something like Fox News and the vast majority of the people who are in bar in America are constantly promoting misinformation.

is far more influential than anything that can happen on social media. However, it is exacerbated and amplified by what we see on social media. So those messages get put onto social media and spread everywhere. And the more familiar you are with a message, the more likely you are to believe it's true. So familiarity just breeds a sense of trueness about information. And so when you're seeing something repeated over and over again, as you do when people reshare and reshare on social media, that embeds that information, which is obviously problematic.

Also, people who are like minded can find each other on social media and form groups where they can create their own little echo chamber with very little disagreement. And that actually leads into that radicalization and in cell community, which I'll talk about in a second. you know, social media is not the problem alone with misinformation, but it's certainly not helping it. And particularly when you have a political elite like Elon Musk, who owns a social media platform and which is now specifically designed.

to share his misinformation. That is primarily what he's using it for and trolling and, you know, disparagement of other people and so on. That's hugely problematic. Twitter was always known for being quite toxic and had its problems, but it was like some sort of utopian paradise pre-Elon Musk in comparison to what it is now. So many people I know have left it now because it's just not even usable. It's not functional for what it previously was. So I think it is

I think it's really interesting on the other side of that. We've got the mainstream media ignoring significant stories in the world. Like the way that events in Gaza are being reported is very disingenuous. A lot of the time, you know, you'll see headlines where it talks about a hundred Gazans killed this and it doesn't say who killed them. There's no blame attributed in a lot of the headlines.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (31:09.326)
It's very one sided the way that things have been reported across the board. There's lots of research and evidence on that. And so what's been really useful is seeing reporting from people on the ground inside Gazette through social media, because that is literally the only way that it's getting reported aside from a few outlets in the Middle East like Al Jazeera and so on. And so there's some balance because we're actually getting to see what happened, whereas, you know, 10, 20 years ago, you might not have seen that at all. It might have just been silence. We wouldn't know what was going on.

So there's benefits to us to dispel misinformation as well as problems with sharing and the dispersal of misinformation as well. The way that it can lead to radicalization is when people keep seeing this information and when it appeals to them. with radicalization into insult, jihadism, right-wing extremism, whatever it is, there's always a vulnerability that is leveraged to bring people into that group.

that could be perceived or real discrimination or prejudice or hardships. So maybe you're unemployed and you get to blame everybody who is a person of color for your being unemployed. They've taken all my jobs or, know, whatever that perception is with the Manosphere, it's men or young boys being told that anything that's wrong in their life, it's women's fault. So if you're lonely, it's because women's standards are too high now and

They are too concerned with their jobs and with how they look and with social media and they don't care about men anymore and that's women's fault, depending on the age group that they're at. that feminism has given them ideas above their station and that really they should be subservient to men. And if that message is appealing. So with right wing extremism and with the Manosphere, the vulnerability tends to be loneliness and a lack of success with women for both of those, even if it's right wing extremism that isn't explicitly the Manosphere.

The Manosphere is basically an umbrella term for all of the kind of misogynistic groups and kind of different strands of misogyny online. So you've got men's rights activists who just are blaming everything that's wrong in society on women and incels are a different group within that. They're involuntary celibates. So they would like to be having sex with women, but they are not. And they form these groups where they hate everything in the world, including themselves. It's a very, very dark.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (33:34.328)
kind of extremism with other groups like right wing extremists or jihadists. They're trying to create a utopian world for themselves and their in group and to do it, they have to get rid of everybody else or at least have them kind of corralled and under their control. With incels, the only way to make things better is to destroy everything, including themselves, because they hate themselves as much as they hate everything else. So it's extremely nihilistic and extremely dark. But the vulnerability there is often loneliness.

but they get caught up in these sometimes this messaging online from people like Andrew Tate who comes across in a way that he's showing how successful, how wealthy he is. He can get all these women and the initial messaging is often kind of positive. Like you can be successful. You can have money. You can be wealthy. It's not starting out with a really dark misogyny and nihilism, but it often leads to that. So with any extremist group, they often start with

kind of like a cult. So we're different and you're different too and you belong with us, like you fit in with us. And that alleviates that sense of loneliness that people have because they find people who are like them and who think like them and who welcome them into a community and give them relationships and a sense of belonging. And that's very compelling if you are very lonely. And then they offer an ideology that explains everything that's going on in your life and makes it not your fault that you can blame other people.

and you start to identify more with the in-group, your group of people, and start to vilify the out-group more. And then there's kind of a pathway towards vilifying the out-group so much that you condone violence against them and maybe you commit violence against them. And that's what happens with these kind of Manosphere groups and Incel groups is they really hate women. They actually hate men and women that aren't them and themselves.

But they blame everything on women and they say it's like a female centric world. Everything is designed for women. Women, you know, have no bad experiences. It's all men having the bad experiences now, which is highly not correlated with the literature or research on women's experiences in the world. But it's it's they take often a kernel of truth and turn it into something else, twist facts to fit their own explanation of the world. And so it's comforting to have

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (35:56.278)
an ideology that allows you to not blame yourself for anything, to blame other people for something. And that's very black and white. There's no nuance or gray areas in it because the world can be, it can be difficult to navigate. You know, there's a lot of complexity in the world and how we interact with other people. Relationships are complex. And when someone's giving you an easy out to say, no, there's really easy answers. It's just very black and white. There's no nuance there. That can be very compelling.

Francis Gorman (36:23.177)
Certainly can, and that was super insightful and thorough to the question asked Nicola. I think we're just up on time, but it's been a real pleasure to have you on. of little nuggets in that conversation. I'm looking forward to listening back to this one again, just to capture parts I may have missed during the conversation, but it was totally enjoyable to have you on and to have that conversation.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (36:47.598)
Thank you for having me on. Really varied conversation. was a really nice question. So thank you very much.

Francis Gorman (36:52.425)
Thanks for coming on and maybe we'll have a part two sometime in the future when you do bit more research and we can look in depth in some of those other areas that you spoke to.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (36:56.31)
Maybe.

Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton (37:03.052)
Yeah, perfect.