If you haven’t watched Traitors on Peacock, here’s the premise: A group of celebrities—mostly from other reality TV shows—arrive at a castle in Scotland to play a social deduction game, similar to Mafia. A few of them are secretly assigned to be “Traitors.” Everyone else is a “Faithful.” The Faithfuls’ job is to figure out who the Traitors are and vote them out. The Traitors’ job is to stay hidden, manipulate the conversation, and pick off Faithfuls one by one. If even one Traitor is left standing at the end, they take all the money. It’s dramatic, it’s entertaining, and it’s a little too familiar.
The longer I watched, the more I saw the show as a mirror for how we process information online—especially when we don’t know who to trust. Every episode, the group sits around a table and tries to figure out the truth based on incomplete information. They pull on threads: Did you see the way he didn’t react to that news? Why did she choose to go that direction on the hill? One moment from this season—whether or not someone kissed someone else on the cheek—became an entire basis for suspicion. A singular data point, taken out of context, used to build a case. Sound familiar? This is what happens every day on social media. Someone cherry-picks one stat, one clip, one moment, and builds a narrative around it without acknowledging the full picture. It gets people to fixate on one thing instead of asking what else might be true.
What makes the show so unsettling as a metaphor is that nobody at the roundtable is an expert. The Faithfuls are guessing. They’re reading body language, tracking social dynamics, following gut feelings—and the people who speak with the most confidence tend to drive the vote, whether or not they’re right. The Traitors, meanwhile, are the only ones who actually know the truth, and they’re deliberately steering the group away from it. On social media, we’re often in that same position: two people debating something neither of them is an expert in, and the one with the better delivery wins. That’s not how good information works, and it’s one of the reasons we focus so heavily at NCC on helping audiences understand who they’re getting information from and what that person actually knows. This season’s winner, Rob, is a perfect case study. He knew his natural demeanor made him trustworthy, so he leaned into consistency—he never overplayed, never made a sudden move. He read the room and went where the conversation was already going. It worked because it felt like common sense, not persuasion. An undercurrent, not a wave. That’s exactly what makes effective misinformation so hard to spot. It doesn’t announce itself. It blends in.
The show is a game, and the stakes are a cash prize. But the mechanics—cherry-picking evidence, building cases on incomplete information, following the loudest voice, discrediting the people who are actually onto something—are the same mechanics we navigate every time we open our phones. The difference is that on social media, the stakes are what we believe about our communities, our health, our democracy. Traitors won’t make you a fact-checker, but it might make you a more honest observer of how easily a group of smart people can be led in the wrong direction when no one stops to ask: What do we actually know, and who in this room has a reason to mislead us?