First, maybe I'll talk a little bit about the disinformation for hire kind of groups and how there is an industry backing a lot of disinformation campaigns, which reminds us that we should not only focus on political and cognitive warfare but also recognize that a lot of these actors are incentivized. Not just platforms, but the creators of disinformation are incentivized to do so because they can generate advertising revenue or business deals with governments.
Thinking about policy responses could also think about raising the costs of engaging in these kinds of activities by making them less profitable, taking the typical kind of scam and fraud approaches and applying them to disinformation and these groups that try to generate advertising revenue by creating fake news stories and getting people to visit websites that show them ads. This is all part of the broader ecosystem of challenges.
When it comes to what citizens should do to navigate this complicated environment, I do think that we don't always give citizens enough credit for the diversity of media they already consume. We don't just get our news from social media. It does play an increasingly important role, but so does what we read in newspapers, what we watch on TV, who our social circles are and who's immediately around us in our community. All of these things play really important roles in shaping our political knowledge and then, therefore, our behaviours.
When we're thinking about solutions, we can focus and hone in on the social media angle, but we can also think about building more robust social institutions to empower people through other kinds of media to have that diverse knowledge and to be able to generate their own political knowledge and opinions.