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In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · 3 min · Oct 21, 2026

Online recommendation loops can boost false claims

Eric Schmidt argues that social media and AI can amplify misinformation through trusted-looking accounts. He checked a claim that data centers were killing cattle and found no police or veterinary reports.

Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt is a former CEO of Google and technology executive.

Scaled Google as CEO through 2011, now runs rocket maker Relativity Space and co-founded Schmidt Sciences.

About this segment

Eric Schmidt argues that social media and AI can amplify misinformation through trusted-looking accounts. He checked a claim that data centers were killing cattle and found no police or veterinary reports.

From “Eric Schmidt: Are We Ready for Superintelligence? | Podcast | In Good Company”, Oct 21, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “Is AI dangerous?” See all 19 answers

“there are no police reports there's no veterinary reports in other words it's fake”
Eric Schmidtat 31:28 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen31:28

Takeaways

  1. People may trust online accounts they believe are real friends.
  2. Algorithms can promote alarming claims without checking them.
  3. Schmidt says the cattle claim lacked police and veterinary reports.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 11:22AI agents could flatten business and speed up work6:14
  2. 17:41Europe needs to make it easier to build AI companies3:16
  3. 35:56AI could remove the coordination tax in large companies2:22
  4. 24:03Free Chinese models could win users despite trailing by months3:14
  5. 3:23Anthropic surpassed Google's revenue-growth record2:07
  6. 8:40AI can use known knowledge, but novel discovery remains uncertain2:41
  7. 21:06A bot incident showed why AI containment matters2:59

  8. 29:34Online recommendation loops can boost false claims2:30

Up next · All-InQuantum-safe security needs to start before quantum computers arrive6:20

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 29:37

    we need to fix that for Europe. What are the implications for democracy? I'm generally, I'm an optimist except on this question. I had thought and was trained as a citizen of America that democracy was a set of sort of values and belief systems around classic liberalism. Classic liberalism, as you know, is personal freedom, freedom of regulation, and capitalism. It doesn't look like that's really true.

  2. 30:06

    It looks like because of AI's use and social media's use, we can get large groups of people who really believe the wrong thing and then vote in an incorrect way to their own interests. so the threat of ai to democracy is very real because in the hands of a skillful operator you can convince people anything is true even though it's completely false and it appears to be what appears to be true is that in a situation where the institutions are declining in trust people trust their friends and because they have friends online they think those friends are real humans so if you wanted to do a misinformation campaign to advance some evil cause which you would never do um it's relatively easy you just build fake friends and then you befriend everyone and then everyone believes you um you know if you look uh in america everyone's very upset about the

  3. 31:06

    data centers i happen to build data centers so i have an interest in this and so one of my friends who's a perfectly nice woman said you realize the data centers are killing cattle and i said hmm i've heard many claims but i haven't heard that one so of course i went to google i did my research and there's a farmer who said that he observed this there are no police reports there's no veterinary reports in other words it's fake why why does this particular person believe it I think she saw it on one of the Instagram or TikTok.

  4. 31:43

    I don't know. I didn't get into that. Because the algorithm and social media thought this is so interesting, of course, it's false, that it promoted it. So in a world where social media and AI together are working in this loop, to promote the most alarmist things. Where does truth end?