Fri Jul 04 2025

Professor Sander van der Linden’s fascination with misinformation traces back to his own family’s scars under Nazism, a regime that perfected propaganda so insidious it seeped invisibly into everyday life. In his award-winning book Foolproof, van der Linden argues that misinformation is a psychological virus, spreading through minds the way a biological virus hijacks cells. From Third Reich leaflets to modern algorithms, the tools have evolved, but the core infection remains the same: exploiting our mental shortcuts and illusions of truth. As the Capitol riots show, unchecked lies can kill. Van der Linden’s mission is urgent: to build psychological vaccines that inoculate society from misinformation before deepfakes, AI, and data-hungry platforms unleash the next generation of invisible propaganda and push us past the point of no return. Guest bio: Professor Sander van der Linden is a Cambridge social psychologist and award-winning author of Foolproof. He pioneered the concept of...