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Technology allows a scale and speed of opinion creation that is extremely seductive to our brain.
技术让观点产生的规模和速度对我们的大脑极具诱惑性。
Social media is the great amplifier of 'collective illusions.'
社交媒体是“集体幻觉”的放大镜。
Collective illusion is a situation where most people in a group go along with an idea that they do not agree with simply because they think that most people in the group actually agree with it.
集体幻觉是指群体中的大多数人会认同自己不认同的观点，仅仅因为他们错误地以为群体中的大多数人都认同这个观点。
And as a result, the entire group ends up doing things that almost nobody wants.
结果，整个团队所做的事情是没有人想做的。
We have found collective illusions everywhere we look-- from the kind of lives we wanna live, to the country we wanna live in, to the way we wanna treat each other, and even what we expect out of our institutions.
集体幻觉随处可见，从我们想要的生活方式，到我们想要生活的国家，再到我们想要对待彼此的方式，甚至是我们对机构的期望。
Every time you go online, you are in a funhouse of mirrors.
每次你上网的时候，就像置身于满是镜子的游乐场中。
The greatest strength of social media is its 'democratizing tendency.'
社交媒体最大的优势就是它的“民主化趋势”。
We don't have to just look to elites and a few news outlets to tell us about us.
我们并不是仅仅依靠精英或少数新闻媒体来了解自身。
We can actually communicate with each other.
实际上我们可以相互交流。
But when we engage online, we tend to think that we're interacting with a reasonable sample of the actual population, but it's not true.
但在网上互动时，我们倾向于认为我们在与一个合理的真人互动，但事实并非如此。
Close to 80% of all content on social media is generated by about 10% of the users.
社交媒体上近80%的内容是由大约10%的用户产生的。
That 10% tends to be extreme on most social issues.
在大多数社会问题上，这10%的人往往是极端的。
They are the vocal fringe.
他们是善于发声的主流。
When you have a vocal minority that is perceived as the majority, critical mass of us will actually either self-silence, or we will actually go along to get along, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
如果你把那善于发声的一小部分人当作大多数人，那么绝大多数的我们都会要么保持沉默，要么趋炎附势，这就变成了一个自我实现的预言。
This is how collective illusions form.
这就是集体幻觉的形成方式。
It's not terribly surprising that some of the first people to start to use these tools to manipulate were leaders who need consensus to conserve power.
第一批开始使用这些工具进行操纵的人中，有一些是需要达成共识以保存权力的领导人，这并不令人惊讶。
An example of this is Nicolas Maduro, the leader of Venezuela.
委内瑞拉领导人尼古拉斯·马杜罗就是一个例子。
For a long time, it looked like, on social media, that he had a pretty good beat on the consensus of the people that he led.
在很长一段时间里，在社交媒体上，他似乎在国民共识中占据了相当大的优势。
So, almost everything that he would say, stories that were written about him that were positive, would be retweeted and shared, and it looked like this represented some kind of consensus, but it turned out a significant percentage of his so-called "followers" were actually what we call 'social bots.'
所以，几乎他说的所有话，关于他的正面报道都会被转发和分享，这看起来代表了某种共识，但事实证明，他所谓的“粉丝”中有相当大一部分实际上是我们所说的“社交机器人”。
These are fake accounts that only exist to retweet anything positive about him or that he said, and, importantly, to attack the opposition.
这些虚假账号的存在只是为了转发关于他或他所说的任何积极的事情，更重要的是，为了攻击反对派。
When Twitter banned them, the real consensus was with the opposition, and that started to emerge and be retweeted as more and more people recognized that it was okay to say what they actually thought.
当他们被推特禁止后，人们真正的共识与反对派达成了一致，越来越多的人意识到他们可以说出自己的真实想法，这些共识开始出现并被转发。
Social media is a free-for-all in terms of who can shout the loudest, and who can silence other people in the name of masquerading as a majority and manufacturing collective illusions.
社交媒体是一场谁能喊得最响，谁能以伪装成多数人和制造集体幻觉的名义让其他人保持沉默的竞争。
Your willingness to conform and your unwillingness to challenge what you think the group believes will actually contribute to leading the group astray.
你愿意顺从，而不愿挑战你认为团队所相信的东西，这实际上会让团队误入歧途。
The solution to our online life is to get offline once in a while.
这种网络生活的解决办法就是时不时离线一会儿。
The most important thing you can do is continue to have conversations with your family, with your neighbors, with your community.
你能做的最重要的事就是继续与家人、邻居、社区进行对话。
Don't carry that distortion over into the way you treat people in real life.
不要把这种扭曲投射到现实生活中待人处事的方式上。
