Have you ever been on social media and had a weird moment of déjà vu? You post something, and then fifty people come back at you with identical talking points.

Maybe they're all brainwashed mainstream media consumers, or maybe it's just bots.

But thanks to a government-sponsored Analysis and Response Toolkit for Trust app being developed by the Hacks/Hackers team and the University of Washington, soon we'll get the best of both worlds where everyone will be able to respond to social media posts just like a brainwashed bot.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded a grant to the group to develop the app to fight "misinformation."

The app will allow you to enter the social media post of a suspected conservative or free-speech advocate, and then the app will tell you why they're wrong and how to appropriately respond.

Sounds fun, doesn't it?

What the project really wants to do is leverage friends and family members' personal conversations to get everyone on board with the latest talking point from the government.

For the past couple of years, there have been hundreds of articles in the liberal media about how to talk to loved ones who have "fallen for conspiracy theories." Usually these articles relate to vaccines, elections, and Democrat-pushed agendas, and offer some variation of the following advice:

• Resist debunking their delusions
• Focus on common connections to build trust
• Ask open-ended questions that make them think
• Be empathetic with their sad existence

To be fair, these tools are evidence-based conflict resolution and negotiation tools, and the articles are worth reading because they work both ways.

However, once you add a constantly shifting narrative that involves real physical danger like child sexual abuse, pandemics, and end-of-the-world scenarios, these are also the exact techniques cult leaders use to gain control over new recruits.

And these are exactly the tools the new toolkit aims to standardize among friends and family to get us all "back on the right track."

The only way out of a cult is usually a dissenting voice that offers a landmark back to objective reality, which until just a few years ago involved none of the talking points being fact checked by this new toolkit.

Be that objective voice.