that is extremely seductive to our brain.

Social media is the great amplifier of 'collective illusions.'

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.

And as a result, the entire group

ends up doing things that almost nobody wants.

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.

Every time you go online, you are in a funhouse of mirrors.

The greatest strength of social media

is its 'democratizing tendency.'

We don't have to just look to elites

and a few news outlets to tell us about us.

We can actually communicate with each other.

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.

Close to 80% of all content on social media

is generated by about 10% of the users.

That 10% tends to be extreme on most social issues.

They are the vocal fringe.

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.

This is how collective illusions form.

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.

- Venezuela. (speaks Spanish)

- An example of this is Nicolás Maduro,

the leader of Venezuela.

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.

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.'

These are fake accounts that only exist

to retweet anything positive about him or that he said,

and, importantly, to attack the opposition.

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.

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.

Your willingness to conform

and your unwillingness to challenge

what you think the group believes

will actually contribute to leading the group astray.

The solution to our online life

is to get offline once in a while.

The most important thing you can do

is continue to have conversations with your family,

with your neighbors, with your community.

Don't carry that distortion over

into the way you treat people in real life.

- This series is brought to you by Stand Together,

a community of changemakers tackling our biggest challenges.

And to learn more about how

you can partner with Stand Together,

visit standtogether.org.