Where can you find the greatest disinformation? X marks the spot.

When it comes to who is most harmed by social media, your gender, politics and religion matter.

Advertising guru Leo Burnett created such 20th-century icons as Tony the Tiger, the Marlboro Man, the Maytag Repairman, United’s “Fly the Friendly Skies”, and Allstate’s “Good Hands.” Like Noam Chomsky, Burnett believed that consent (in his case, consent to purchase one product instead of another) could be manufactured just like the product itself.

Fast forward to the second decade of the 21st century, and social media combined with smartphones drove that to heights never conceived by the inventors of either, at least at the outset. Now that they better understand these effects, app developers and social platforms are targeting the youngest possible audiences to instill habits of consumerism, brand loyalty, and political preferences at the earliest available age.

Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at New York University, told Hidden Brain podcast host Shankar Vedantam recently that inequality, hierarchy and sexism have always been present, in nearly every culture, but dense religious networks or extended families and clans served as a moat against despair. Today a similar moat is providing some protection against mental health…