Yes.
Obviously, people have some amount of free choice to double-confirm everything that they're reading and things like that. I try to look, as a sort of a behavioural scientist, at just the reality of human behaviour. What do most people do most of the time? The challenge is that when we are so overloaded and our attention is so finite and we're constantly anxious and checking things all the time, there really isn't that time to realistically double-check everything.
There are two kinds of persuasion. There's persuasion where if I the magician tell you how this works, suddenly the trick doesn't work anymore because you know that it's a technique. There are forms of advertising where that's happened. The second kind of persuasion is that even if I tell you what I'm doing, it still works on you. A good example of this is what Dan Ariely, the famous behavioural economist, says, that it's about flattery. If you tell someone, “I'm about to flatter you and I'm making it up,” it still feels really good when you hear it.
A second example of this is if you put on a virtual reality helmet. I know that I'm here in San Francisco in this office, but in the virtual reality helmet, it looks like I'm on the edge of a cliff. If you push me, even though my mind knows that I'm here in San Francisco, millions of years of evolution make me feel like I should not fall over.
What we have to recognize is that the socio-psychological instincts, such as those that arise when children are shown an infinite set of photos of their friends having fun without them—“I know that is a highlight reel; I know that is a distortion”—still have a psychological impact on people. The same thing is true of the kinds of toxic information or malinformation that Claire is talking about.