Clint Watts:

Yes.

The biggest challenge we face moving forward isn't the Russians. It's really other Americans who see this technique and see the political gain that can come from it and adopt it on their own, meaning they come up with their own news outlets which maybe aren't telling the truth, but tell a truth that is preferred.

We have started looking for alternative facts. We have to have a baseline of fact and fiction in this country, or you can't have political debate. We can't go to Congress and have good policies because we don't even agree what's actually happening in the real world.

The reason social media influence works is because of bias. One, we go to social media for confirmation bias. We want to read things that confirm what we already believe.

The second part is implicit bias. We like getting information from people that look like and talk like us. The Russians understood this very well. Tell people what they want to hear, and look like them, and they were more likely to take it, whether it's true or not.

So, a way to get around that is to help the consumer. Rather than trying to have the government regulate everything or even have social media companies trying to determine what is good or bad news, is to create an independent rating agency that rates on two sort of axes.

The first one is fact vs. fiction. What is — a rating period, how do they perform over time? And the other one is opinion vs. reporting. It's very hard on social media to know, is this an opinion article that I'm receiving or is this actually a reported article?