You know… In my life I’ve had to talk a few people out of scams.
I know they were scammed, it’s blatantly a scam, the evidence is overwhelming, my experience is solid, everyone I know of’s experience says the same.
Yet they will argue with you back and forth and never really be satisfied because they want to believe it so much, and I imagine it stings a good bit being told you’re being ripped the fuck off and you’re too stupid or inexperienced to understand that.
I’m never confrontational about it, I just make it very perfectly clear that proceeding would be extremely ill advised, and that even their own worries brought them to me asking for my opinion because they trust my judgment.
It scares me how long it takes to convince them, and how often in the end they come to me a month later and I ask them how it went, and they went and bought it anyway, for whatever far fetched rationalization they managed to construct for themselves.
Psychology is real, psychology is simple, all it takes to control humans is to have no care for anything but yourself.
The concept of AI weaponized mass propaganda on social media makes it less mysterious.