Anyone

They said […] they would rape my wife if I do not sit and answer phone calls. They tried all kinds of coercive manoeuvres. You know, using a fire extinguisher to [pretend] to hit me to scare me, using a plastic bag over my head to suffocate me.

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Experts estimate there are hundreds of thousands of scammers in the industry across Southeast Asia. Some of them are unrepentant criminals, ruthlessly exploiting victims across the world. Others are victims themselves, trafficked and held against their will. Others still are desperate people willing to participate in the industry to survive, but once inside, find they can no longer leave.

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Investigators have spoken to nearly 100 survivors from compounds mostly located in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar. They have also interviewed local and international civil society organisations, policymakers and law enforcement throughout Southeast Asia.

Because the industry is hidden behind high walls mounted with barbed wire and surveillance cameras, they have also spent countless hours tracking the scammers online.

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Link to the article (archived): Ripping the public apart? Politicians’ dark personality and affective polarization -- [February 2025]

New research shows that dark traits of a political leader have an effect when voters feel ideologically close to the politician in question, while the personality traits of political opponents have little to no effect on the degree of polarisation.

In a new study published in the 'European Journal of Political Research,' scientists from University of Amsterdam (UvA), the University of Lausanne and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, linked the personality profiles of over 90 prominent politicians worldwide with voter attitudes in 40 national elections. The results reveal striking patterns. Politicians who score high on the so-called Dark Triad – narcissism (excessive self-focus), psychopathy (emotional coldness and lack of empathy), and Machiavellianism (a tendency toward manipulation and deception) – are associated with greater hostility toward political opponents among their followers.

[The] results suggest that the dark personality of top politicians can be associated with heightened affective polarization in the public – but only for candidates of voters’ in-party (that is, their preferred party), and only for high levels of ideological proximity between the candidate and the voter. The other personality traits have weaker effects, and the personality of out-group candidates (that is, candidates of voters’ most disliked party) seems overall rather marginal. In other terms, what our results suggest is a proximity effect for dark personality in elites.

According to the study, this is somewhat at odds with the popular idea that people might become cynical and radicalized due to how much they dislike the character of their political opponents:

What [...] results suggest is that dark traits in elites have an ‘in-house’ effect. It is ‘our’ candidate, in particular if we feel close to them, that drives our partisan animosity the most – specifically, their dark traits. In other terms, our models predict that it is in particular among very close supporters of dark candidates that we find the highest levels of affective polarization.

The trends shown in our analysis come with some notable limitations, the study says:

Allthough they stem from a large-scale analysis and should thus be more resistant towards critiques of low external validity, they nonetheless build on evidence that is essentially observational in nature, with the inherent risk of endogeneity. Specifically, our data and results cannot exclude the fact that voters self-select into being close to darker candidates because they are affectively polarized – and not the other way around. That is, we cannot prove that it is the dark personality of politicians that cause affective polarization to move upwards.

Democratic risks

The findings cast a critical light on the global rise of ‘dark’ leaders. According to the researchers, the confrontational and uncompromising personality traits of such leaders pose clear risks to democratic processes. ‘When the personal traits of leaders poison public discourse, the public’s willingness to cooperate weakens, social cohesion suffers, and ultimately democratic norms erode,’ says co-author Katjana Gattermann of the UvA.

The researchers call for greater awareness of the role (dark) personality plays in political leadership, in particular when these traits appear in strongmen. Nai concludes: ‘We have shown in previous research that dark personality traits are particularly frequent in authoritarian leaders and populists; the evidence seems thus to be piling up that narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism are important phenomena if we want to understand why politics, today, seems so confrontational.’

These limitations notwithstanding [...] the findings discussed in our article are furthermore worrisome in light of dynamics of democratic backsliding [...]. Dark traits seem to be particularly prevalent among autocrats and populist [...], suggesting a potentially nefarious intersection between uncompromising leaders, democratic deconsolidation and affective polarization. Further research should investigate these dynamics more in detail, including regarding the intervening role of (dark) communication strategies linking elites and voters directly.

... people today are less concerned about the type of vehicle they travel in, and more about how useful it is. To many of us, what matters most is simply getting where we’re going rather than how we look while doing it.

More than technology, mobility has always been governed by social trends and cultural norms that evolve over time. The currently transport revolution therefore no longer depends solely on a group of engineers, but on understanding users’ true needs.

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The way we move around in Europe is not just changing because of technology, but also because of how we think. For future transport systems to work, we need to understand how different people view, use, and adapt to these new ways of moving.

This means that governments, companies, and innovators need to work together. It’s not enough for transport to be fast or eco-friendly, it must also be accessible and affordable for everyone, taking into account the unique needs of each section of society. This means technology cannot be disconnected from real life. We need to teach people how to use digital tools, make sure everyone has access to new services, and design systems that fit the way people actually live.