I try to be an optimist. It is 5:16 in the morning here in Seoul, so it's particularly difficult.
The problem at a global level is epistemic. There's just a ton of information, and it's moving very quickly. We have evolved for a very different sort of environment from an environment in which information is flying at us from all over the place all the time and we can't process it or reflect on it.
On top of that, this being a partisan-charged environment where people have incentives to use that information to try to mislead, the troubles are going to be extremely difficult and increasingly difficult, especially as the technology gets better. We're now seeing deep fakes, the ability to fake video. It's very convincing and very terrifying, as far as I'm concerned. That's going to be a global problem that's going to be difficult to deal with.
To the extent that [Technical difficulty--Editor] deals with this, it's going to be through limiting money and through limiting foreign activity. The way to choke it off to the extent that it's possible is to try to get to the source of what's driving it, and that's often money. Keep in mind that a lot of this is being driven by profit. Some of it's driven by political ends or ideological ends, but a lot of it is just profit. We all know that the Macedonian teens in the U.S. election ran fake news websites from their basements because it paid better than anything else, but for a long time they were doing it on both sides. They started to switch and did more for the right-wing Republicans because the money was better. It was about the money.
I think the thing we can do in the here and now is figure out the broader epistemic concerns about how we train better citizens and how we produce capacity for digital media and trusted sources. How we protect the news environment so that we have trusted sources in new and traditional media is to find a way to limit the money, and this is a good start, but there is a bigger issue, as I've just indicated, which is how we protect the news media so that people have a reliable source and a gatekeeper. That is a discussion we need to have as well.