Internet Culture featuring Dr Jamie Cohen

FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can be in the know in 30 minutes. Hosted by Fair Media Council CEO and Executive Director Jaci Clement, Fast Chat features notables in news, media, and business.

Thank you for joining us today. I'm Jaci Clement, CEO and Executive Director of the Fair Media Council. We have a lot of new people with us today, so before I get to our main event, which is Dr. Jamie Cohen talking to you about a really great subject, which is internet culture today, I want to tell you just a little bit about the Fair Media Council. We are a 501 nonprofit organization, and we focus on advocating for quality news and working to create a media-savvy society because the media landscape continues to fragment and get even more complicated day by day. So we're here to help you make sense of that. So today Jamie is going to talk about digital stuff. Normally you find me talking about new stuff, so that would be the difference, but they marry up very nicely. So if you have any questions or if you'd like to become a member, please reach out to me at any time. I'd like to thank our sponsors for today, which is Northwell Health and St. Joseph's University. These workshops we do on a monthly basis, and I hope we'll see you again. So with that, let me introduce to you Jamie Cohen, who is the head of education for Digital Void, an internet Literacy Project that helps people bridge the gap between digital life and everyday culture. Jamie holds a PhD in cultural and media studies specializing in internet culture and graphical communication. He formerly founded and directed the new media degree at Molloy University and continues to lead teams of students in immersive digital production design projects in Rome, Italy. Jamie is now an assistant professor of media studies at CUNY Queens College. So with that, Jamie, we're going to turn things over to you.

Thank you so much, Jaci. I really appreciate it. And thank you so much for having me part of this. This is a really fun opportunity and something that I, of course, love talking about. And first thing is to understand that internet culture is culture. And what I mean by that is very, very specific. Internet culture— when I say internet culture is culture, it is the idea that internet, there is no outside to it. We have no ability in our present to think of a world without YouTube or Google. When you think of something or when you have a question about something, you don't think about anything except, I can Google it, I can YouTube it. Almost all of us have at least once looked up something on YouTube in order to fix something, to figure something out. And by doing that, we know that that's our— that's there. So that means culture is part of that. We slide in between of them. That leads me to the next one, which is there is no such thing as digital dualism. A lot of people want to think that we are 2 different people, one on the internet, one off in real life. And I'm gonna use the term real life 'cause it's just easier, but that's not what, you know, it's everything's real life. The internet and real life are the same. The internet is a tool. So when we communicate, we happen to be liberated in some ways by communicating online, but we are not dualist. We are the same. We are the same on both. But this also requires our attention. And so I think a lot of what I'm gonna talk about today is the attention that we should be giving to the internet, especially when I do studies like internet culture to help us explain why it is that we look at internet culture as a subject matter and a scholarly endeavor. So first is information flows. How does it move? And this is really important to the journalists. So anybody who's a journalist and focusing on internet culture or internet studies should really understand that information flows from the internet in a very interesting manner. Jamal Jordan actually has a good, interesting post here. We have to admit that the rise of disinformation is due in part to the fact that the journalism industry didn't take covering internet culture seriously until 2016. And I love this quote. I usually start all of my decks with this exact tweet because this is a brilliant tweet. And the reason why I think it's an important tweet to start with is because just a few months later, this happened. And what's interesting about this still in particular is you actually see a man wearing a Pepe mask, a red hat, and a Kyrgyzstan flag on his back climbing the steps of the Capitol. When you see that, you're not looking at a man wearing the Pepe costume. You're actually watching the internet in real life. That is the internet. That's internet culture in real life. What you're seeing is the bit that— so we, we don't often— we often think about like invading our spaces. The first half of this, I'm going to focus a bit on how the far right uses the internet, because it's important for journalists to start seeing how it's— a lot of it's used in bad faith. And what's interesting about how we see this image is that this is often taken as an incursion into our physical space. But The reason this happened is often it's a reactionary movement because of their feeling that others had incurred in their spaces, their private sections of the online internet. TikTok trends and Facebook groups and YouTube and Twitter, they all play into what goes on in the background in social media and what happens all the time. One or two things become amplified. So some way or another, something gets the notice of an influencer or a journalist. Oftentimes these are celebrities. These are people that have a lot of following and somebody who sees something. Think about the corn kid. He loves corn. He's just our update to I Like Turtles, but he is— happens during those times where every time there's a little kid doing something cute and they get to be amplified. So that's, that's what I mean by amplified. However, what I'm going to talk about here is sort of like controversial topics. Anything that is kind of like needs to be explained often gets dumped into super hyper-partisan outlets on the internet, things that get a lot of views and are commodified and have a lot of ads on them. Then it ends up in our public space. And that's a problem because journalists here aren't seeing it from here. They're seeing it through that demimedia filter. I'm gonna tell you a short story. The story goes like this. So there's this man named Andrew Tate, who we— I'm sure you've probably heard of by this moment, but if you haven't, it's good that we have a recording of this. You know, we could see this again, or you could look up more information on this, because this, this man has become very famous very quickly, but has been around for quite some time. Andrew Tate is a misogynist, a self-proclaimed misogynist, who was kicked off the Big Brother show in the UK in 2016 due to rape allegations that came up about 5 days into his tenure on the show. So 5 days in, he was kicked off. He, of course, denies it and says it was consensual. The video evidence doesn't seem that way at all. He then becomes somewhat famous for being a reactionary and a pickup artist. So now, a decade later, which is so interesting, Andrew Tate decides to kick this off again and create something that looks fairly normal, but it's very bad. He creates Hustler's University. It's $49.99, I think, a month. Uh, and he made, I think, $11 million off this last year. Um, and it is a method of teaching people how to become grifters and misogynists. I mean, that's— you literally pay to do that. He frames it in a way of like treating women better, and he launders this idea through Joe Rogan and other mainstream podcasts. people now finding sympathy, because now Andrew Tate is public. Now, something that existed solely on the internet, a story that would exist solely inside of the spaces where we don't really get access to that information, is now public information. And when we don't have the right type of filters, or we don't have the right type of interactivity that we, that we need from journalists to ask the questions about this, we get hyper-partisan responses to it. And hyper-partisan in this case is young men who think that something went wrong. And of course, the people like everyone else who feels like this is the comeuppance that is necessary for a man who was caught sex trafficking a young woman. So the woman claims that she was allegedly kidnapped age 16. So all the things that are often pushed onto their enemies is often projection. And Andrew Tate is now in jail. He spends the next, I think, 15 or so days in the Romanian jail. And he's— I mean, we'll see what happens from there. But it's amazing to see that this response then happens. And so Greta then responds, this is what happens when you don't recycle your pizza boxes, which creates a viral tweet. And so we come to it from that endpoint. What's interesting though too is how the world sees this. So there was also this part about miscommunication that happens globally. Because Greta had posted a thing about small dick energy, across the world there was a response about body shaming. They— because there's a loss in translation of internet culture, we forget that internet culture itself has languages that are distinctly regional. And so when you're in different regions, you're going to hear things in different ways. In the US, we know that slang to be something different of the— its opposite here. And then we hear it and we kind of understand it. There's a nuance to it, a meme that we sort of just get. Where in other countries, they think, oh, that's not fair. Why would Greta make— be making fun of him? Greta Thunberg is fluent. She is absolutely fluent in internet culture, and her fluency makes her very, very important, a very good communicator to see how internet culture is its own language and environment. This is her responding to Donald Trump because he had said that she looked like a very happy young woman looking forward to a bright winter future sarcastically, and so she responded that way. There's many listicles out there of Greta Thunberg's clapbacks of people on the internet. She's fairly good at it. Greta was arrested, I think, yesterday at a, um, um, at a protest, and so I'm sure she'll be freed soon. Um, but there it's— she's a very active activist. All right, so like I said, that's a lot right there. That's a lot to talk about. But one tweet often gives us enough backstory to help us see how internet culture flows. What does that look like, and where does it How does it operate, and how do we interact with that type of information? In other words, we would come across a lot of this stuff from the end of the story, but it really does require interrogation and an importance of taking it seriously for people to start seeing why internet culture should be taken seriously as a subject matter. That's because the world is changing. Where is this going? Like, what happens now, now that we know that the internet itself is part of the flow that changes the reality? What happens in the next decade? So like I said, the, the 20— the 2000s were like this stack, all these new inventions, new apps, new technologies. Facebook was born, uh, Twitter, Instagram. Oh, Instagram was 2011. But so we saw a lot of vertical growth. The 2010s, scaling. They tried to scale outward. But now there's a lot of shift that's going on, especially in generative AI and the decline or the degradation of social media. I'm gonna start with AI. This may raise some questions, so we'll come back to this. Um, and then the degradation of social media. Generative AI is the umbrella term for LLMs and GANs. So you might know GANs from this, this persondoesnotexist.com, which is, uh, a website where you can just click refresh and it generates a person, and it, it's a person that does not exist. I don't know if you've noticed thus far, but every single image I've used in this thing is made from DALL-E. Uh, so DALL-E, you could tell from its little, uh, little rainbow thing on the lower right of the image. That's where all these images have come from. And if I go back to the creator image, that is a fake person. That is a DALL-E image when I typed in the prompt, um, creator on the Shard in London doing a vlog. So that, that is what those images come from. So a lot of what AI does is interprets how we communicate with it. So think about this. So we had just talked about how algospeak is the users avoiding content moderation or moving away the algorithm works. The 2020s are going to see a lot of the ways that we talk to the machine because the prompt, the input, is going to be so important for us going forward. How you tell DALL-E to make an image is important because when it chooses how to make a generation, generate from nothing, It has to be told what to come, what to do. So GPT-3, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, Midjourney, Lensa, these are all different apps. Many of them use each other's technology, like DALL-E uses OpenAI, Midjourney uses, and Lensa use Stable Diffusion. These are the bots, the machines underneath it all. There is a downside, a huge, huge downside to this, and this is something that I think is really important that we talk about. To sum this up, and this is where I hope some questions come in. AI has— is a model, a language, a learning model, which means that it has datasets. It means those datasets come from somewhere. Someone has to develop the dataset that absorbs all of it and then presents it, because AI only works because it's been fed that type of information. If any of you have used Lensa, you may have noticed a very, very interesting disturbing response to the images. When female people, identifying people, use the app, oftentimes it came out with bodies that were irregular or had larger breasts or even came out nude in some occasions, where men did not have the same experience. That's because the dataset that Stable Diffusion is pulling from is not only pulling from artists, And many of them don't know where their art was being used in this way, but it's being used by what art is or images are from in general. To learn what a human looks like, an AI has to look at a lot of humans. And where are the most amount of pictures on the internet of humans? Pornography. And so a lot of the dataset that makes Stable Diffusion operate is from porn. And so when you create an image, you're actually drawing from many people who don't even know that their body's being replicated into your images because it's being pulled. You can't see it. Is it possible for us to even know that AI is clean at this point? Because what I just said is this is interesting. So if AI pulls from a dataset and that dataset is filled with all the things that currently exist, then every time you create an AI image, it currently exists, which means the next time the AI has to be trained, it's using information that already exists. We're starting to feed AI with AI output. So when you're starting to see AI now, It means the AI is already pulling from data sources that are from its own AI. So when we create generated text like GPT-3 or 4, when it sources that, it's taking from a dataset of existing, which means some of the text that exists is AI written. So it's creating a feedback loop. So when you use this bot, when I hope you do, um, it's fun because it's an AI that responds in a very humanistic way, and it does that because it's using human data. To respond to it in the vernacular of the subreddit. So please, when you get a chance, try to use the areyoutheasshole.com, which is just a funny satire on it, and you get to see how GPT works with— again, I'm doing this clean data because, again, when we're interacting or interrogating this type of stuff, we also have to understand that people who use I Am the Asshole are sometimes lying. So that data is often made for virality, and it's sometimes made for ways that aren't exactly clean anyway. So all of this comes down to whether the ethics work, but we should always be focusing on the coded bias. One of the most important things about AI is you— it's only as smart as the AI that is the coders doing it. So if an algorithm helps develop the prompt, it means that there's coded biases in the datasets that are unseen, or what's known as blind spots. So, uh, for, for those of you seeing this right now, you can probably see where the coded bias comes from. Um, you could see the term family at a dinner table, large bowl of spaghetti in the center of the table. Um, who did it present when I typed in family? Why did it only create white families? Why did it only do that? And aside from the very leftmost image where it doesn't even understand how spaghetti works, um, why did it create that way? So now back to when we talked about the DOGE and the need for qualifications, you could see that I had to type in the words Black family at a dinner table. With a large bowl of spaghetti in order to get a Black family because it would not have happened otherwise. Hang on a second. So this is the— so this is interesting because we see that this is the dataset that comes in here and this is a coded bias that is very much something that we don't really even think about because it is a blind spot that we don't often recognize. And so that's something that is coded into it. That's just something too important to understand going forward because that is— that's the things that are not part of what we really truly understand with it. So last bit here. What if— this is how I'm going to end this— what if we're witnessing the end of social media? What if we're seeing social media come to its odd and strange demise in terms of a place that things work, that has always been there, that we kind of think about? It's only 20 years old. And that's interesting because in the 20 years, the 2 decades, it's become functionally part of everything we do. Just as there's no outside to Google and there's no outside to YouTube, social media is how we interact. Several countries on this earth use social media to communicate directly with their public. It is how we keep in contact with people. It's how policy has shifted. During the Trump days, that is often how policy happened. It would be beta tested on Twitter, and then it would be moved into politics and then moved into law, which means that social media itself is part of our civics. That's how it works. Elon Musk's recent acquisition of Twitter has changed how we see— well, how we see billionaires, for one thing. We start seeing billionaires in a different way in terms of what they're really capable of. And 2, what it means to really truly operate a social media site. But why am I focusing on Twitter? Like, why does it matter? Twitter is very much like just one of the many apps. Ryan Broderick actually had a very— probably the most cogent take on it, and I'll use this one most specifically. Trust and safety and content moderation across social media platforms often use Twitter as an idea of what is good for restriction and what is good for public accessor and so forth? How do we know what should be the bar? Where do we allow what goes to the public and what doesn't? And so in Brian's post called Doomscrolling is the Point, which is his play on Adam Serwer's thing, he notices that the Taliban is now much more— the Taliban has now been much more verified because Elon has given the ability for people to pay $8 to become verified on the site. And so he says, anyway, I found the best way to track deterioration of Twitter is how many times a week I'm forced to see content from the Taliban. And because they've spent the $8, they allow themselves to get into the feed. So this is a quote that I think is really important. In the years before Musk bought Twitter, there was a bunch of back and forth about whether or not members of the Taliban should be verified on the app. One of the few reliefs of the Musk era is that he completely— that he is completely uninterested in the especially repulsive kind of neoliberal policymaking that defines social networks in the 2010s. Online platforms would hire academics and think tanks and meet with politicians and lawyers and publicly agonize things over, should the Taliban get a little blue check mark on a website? The pageantry of it all was ridiculous, but I'm sure it made all the former Obama staffers working in Silicon Valley feel better about the other human rights abuses their companies and technologies were facilitating. And that's a really deep— this is a bit tough to So the, um, so this is something I think is important to interrogate just in general, because we often as users don't, uh, don't really understand that social media and news and everything is kind of laundered itself. And sometimes when we look at social media as very exciting, or we look at things as like beautiful, or trying to see things that are, um, neat rather than— and novel rather than serious, we start looking at things of hiding. Abuses. Many social media have content moderation systems all across the world of poorly paid labor who don't really get the representation they need nor the safety that they need to do their jobs. And we can hide that by looking at things and being like, look how cool this is, look how things are changing, look how we do policy. Maybe we shouldn't allow the Taliban on there. It's a lot of proselytizing on something that we don't think about because we only use the internet from the user standpoint. We don't access it from the point of seeing it from a builder's technology of where that comes from. And that's the thing I think the 2020s will have to have us unload. Not— again, there's always that line of never give somebody credit when they're doing the bad thing, but you gotta hand it to Elon here for kind of opening that discussion up. So now we're starting to start seeing the bare bones things and structures of how social media had operated. It's important. I took this line from Spectrum Labs, but this is what trust and safety is. I think it's one of the most important parts of how the internet operates. Trust and safety is a set of business practices whereby an online platform reduces the risk that users will be exposed to harm, fraud, and other behaviors outside of community guidelines. Effective trust and safety create a safe and inclusive environment for users, allowing platforms to build and maintain relationships while growing the size and diversity of the audience. So it's very difficult, and this is something that's overlooked, and I'm trying to make this big part of the discussion. I'm actually trying to pitch a course about brand safety because that's the easiest way to map in trust and safety. But trying to bring trust and safety in as an academic endeavor, because this is where the more we interrogate the backend, the better. So I know that was a lot of doom and gloom, a lot going on, but on the other hand, we— there is hope. I teach Gen Z, and I see a lot of differences that have happened in the past. And I think this is a lot very, very— I'm very hopeful. While I often see the things happening with like Nick Fuentes and him creating an army, I think that's a wild minority. I'm bringing it up because I think it's important for us to interrogate and think about, but it isn't the thing to be scared of. I think we should be hopeful. I think we should start seeing things from the perspective of influencers making changes. We saw in the 2018— the 2022 election, I'm sorry, the 2022 election that just happened, the amount of influencers and young Gen Z operators who really wanted to get youth activation out. Because if voter participation goes up, we'll see progress happen in a very different way. And it's Gen Z's world. It's their future. So when we start reporting or we start thinking about how to talk about internet culture, we have to start thinking about them. They're that, that audience, the Gen Z audience, the people born from 1997 to 2012, and then the Gen Alpha, the people who were born anytime after that. And so those audiences are going to be the top consumers, and they're going to be the people who are making the decisions. So these platforms are not going away. They're not drifting. New platforms that are becoming popular like TikTok and BeReal and anything in which there's more instantaneity and authenticity is going to be up. Snapchat still resides at one of the top used platforms for young people. And when I did my Italy class this past summer, almost every student was using BeReal, and I thought that was very interesting. I think I've aged out of that, but I find it very, very interesting. In terms of how we interact with the internet.

I appreciate that. Thanks so much, Jamie. That was really fascinating. One question I have, and it's a little bit off topic, but as you were going through it, I was wondering the impact of all of this on our basic attention span so that we can actually either not or go ahead with looking at the bias, you know, because It just seems like everything's moving so fast.

Yeah, I think that's— so that's partially by design. Um, I think a lot of when we start thinking about it, the attention span and the shortening of it, and TikTok being this infinite upward scroll of thumb flicking, and you could literally fall in like a time, time hole. You know, you go in and you start working on it and just you— an hour goes by. I think that's part of the, uh, a term that Mark Zuckerberg said, which is time spent. The more time we spend on social media, the more money that they're making because more ads are being seen. it does, uh, impress upon us the inability to be critical. Uh, there's a very, very famous commercial by Casey Neistat for Samsung where he does a call to action about becoming a YouTuber, and he says you'll live a life so fast and so free that you won't have time to even think about it. And I think he just said the quiet part out loud. I think that's just the important part there, is that he understood that in order for this to succeed, we can't really sit there and interrogate this all the time.

Also, it's It's hard. It's—

this is a difficult thing. What I'm— what I'm— what I think is important is that we just spend a few extra seconds thinking about these, these parts, because there's— you're right. I think the attention span itself is very difficult for us to overcome before we get to any of this. Um, but that is— I think the more we really stay strong and like focus on that, we can know what we're— who's in charge, who's in the driver's seat. I think that's important.

Okay. All right. So wild prediction here, 20 years out from now, what social media platforms do you think will still be with us?

Wow. Wow. That is, you know, I don't even know. You asked me 2 years ago, I would have said Twitter and Facebook. But, but I think if I were to take a guess, I would probably say Facebook isn't going anywhere ever. I think that's been weaved in. I think it will plateau. I think it has plateaued and it's having a difficult time scaling. But I think that's now part of the structure because they own— Meta owns WhatsApp and Instagram. And so WhatsApp itself is a news gathering site for a lot of the global south. And so it's really hard to sunset those types of technologies. And since the majority of the world uses Facebook, it's still there. Um, I think it'll look different, obviously. I think 20— thinking back 20 years, you think ahead 20 years, I think it'll be a lot more immersive, probably wearable, probably not VR, but I think a lot of AR, a lot of, a lot of glasses and specs, um, and a lot of gesture controls and speaking. But I don't think it'll be gone. I don't foresee Twitter surviving this decade. I think TikTok will advance and morph. I think there will be a version of TikTok that exists far into the future. I don't know if it'll look like TikTok, but I think it's— ByteDance itself, I think, is a major player in the future.

Okay. And would you happen to know, because as you're as you're talking, and so much of it becomes— since it's so much part of our culture now, I'm wondering if there's anything going on in the K through 12 education system talking about how kids can become educated on these issues.

Phenomenal question. Um, that's Edie.

Hi, doggy.

Uh, the, um, there's not enough. There are very, very good educators out there who are taking their time to do this. I've worked on many PDs, professional developments, with teachers who are interested in this. Baldwin School District on Long Island has a new media academy. They're trying to do K-12. Some schools on Long Island do interrogate like the idea of the archive. In other words, what's your digital footprint? So it is an exercise for young kids. There's— because of the, the safety for children, oftentimes it's not acceptable to be used in school. So I think it's avoided more than not. I think a lot of teachers live in a sort of a— not a— I don't want to say a fear, but it's definitely a risk that they don't want to take. So it's something that many educators want to be interrogating, but— and it's not that they're not, it's just that it's not happening enough. It will. I think the 2020s are going to show us a whole new way of talking about this, and that's kind of what I wanted to do today was Have new discussions. I think it starts with the family. I think it starts with the people close to you. I think it starts with people who are unaware, and you can help have these discussions, and then that starts flowing into teachers and communities around you.

And are you seeing the age of when people start using social networks changing?

Yeah, it's getting younger.

Is it?

Yeah, and it's— 13 is supposed to be the minimum age, but of course, That doesn't stop anybody.

Yeah.

There's younger, younger people are getting smarter smartphones and access. It's a question that I think all parents need to start asking too, is what's the appropriate age for it? And when their peers— most of it's peer pressure— when their peers start using it, BeReal is a peer pressure system. You have to take a picture during the 2-minute window it offers you, and if you don't, you can't see anybody else's posts. So a lot of the apps are going to lean into that type of pressure, FOMO, uh, things, um, where I'm much more of the JOMO now, the joy of missing out. Um, but the, the fear of missing out is part of the programming that's in there. That's Instagram's thing. Instagram's, uh, code was designed specifically for, um, jealousy. And so it's, it's younger people are susceptible to that. So I think we have to teach confidence, uh, first and show that the social media apps are just, just apps. But it's hard. It is a very difficult Conversation.

This is something you, you think people should be discussing around the dinner table, or it, it tends to lead to fighting and you don't want to mix, mix in with that?

It does, it does lead to fighting. People have very strong opinions on this. I don't—

I—

everybody I know has a strong opinion on this. So it's— that's why we talk— it's easier to back out, back out from the strong sub— the surface material and start talking about like the cultural aspects of it. like maybe even mapping it onto things that happened a decade ago or 2 decades ago, or, or trying to find an analog. Um, analogs are really good because these things— none— all the things we have now aren't new. They're just technologically different. They're just— we, we do these very much the same actions over and over, but we see them through different lenses and different activities. So if we talk about, uh, responsibility and ethics, and we talk about, um, what's our ability to be, uh, responsible for one another, that's helpful. I often take the Douglas Rushkoff look on this one, which is that we're humans first, and we have to find the others like that. And we get— it's not a, it's not a click, like somebody doesn't change their mind and they're just like, oh, you were right. But finding where we could connect, then you start seeping in that type of information.

Okay, I don't know if anyone has any questions. If so, if you can use the Q&A box. And I guess one last question for me, though, from what I'm seeing that concerns me is, you know, for a while there, the idea of fake news has disturbed people. But as AI grows, the idea of experiencing fake news is on the radar now.

Yeah.

So how do we even begin to tackle that subject? When you'll now be arguing with people who think something happened because they experienced something, as opposed to just read it or listen to it.

Yeah, this is— I didn't get into deepfakes here. Um, I meant to drop this into the link for everybody. I didn't get into deepfakes here, but I think fake news is going to be our biggest fight in the next decade. I think we're with generation, with GPT and, uh, deepfake technology, We're going to see people interacting with a new reality that they just weren't prepared for. The resilience for that is going to be something we're going to be studying. I don't have a distinct answer because I do believe we truly live in a post-truth world. The United States is very specifically very conspiracy-minded, and an article in The Atlantic points to our partisan media, not partisanship. Conspiracies are different than partisanship. In the UK, they often say BBC being the most watched news network gives everybody consensual reality. It's tough when you don't have a consensual reality. And so fake news only builds off of non-consent— it builds off everybody having their own reality. So as long as we have different ideas and different answers, it's there. One thing that I do want to note before I go here is that conspiracy theories are theories that offer answers to people, and they're simple. Oftentimes when you get the answer, it means that it's not real. We're supposed to be learning. It's a process, and it's very uncomfortable. for people to feel uncomfortable with something unanswered. So people lean into conspiracy theories because there is an answer. It's not the right answer, but there is an answer. Fake news builds off of those answers. So if we are more comfortable with the unknown and the uncertain, knowing that other people are doing their best to find those answers, and lean into journalists that really do that work, we know that they're— we're in the right hands for that. So it is just a matter of like comfort and responsibility and really comfort in the unknown. But that's hard. It's hard to do. We're at a point where people are not comfortable with their own wallets. How are they going to be comfortable with information? So it's, it's, it's a tough time. The Fair Media Council is a 501 nonprofit organization advocating for quality news and working to create a media-savvy society. For more information about the Fair Media Council and upcoming Fast Chat Check out fairmediacouncil.org. This podcast is a part of the C-Suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-suite-radio.com.