On a sweltering July afternoon in Seoul, a crowd gathered inside the waiting room of Seoul Station, their eyes fixed on a large screen broadcasting a moment that felt both historic and deeply personal. Citizens of all ages stood in silence as the first-trial verdict for former President Yoon Suk-yeol was read aloud. The charge: violating the Public Official Election Act by publishing false information during his presidential campaign. When the judge announced a sentence of one year and six months in prison, suspended for three years, the room seemed to exhale all at once—some in quiet approval, others in…

Paragraph 1 Remember when social media felt like a miracle of connection? In the early days of Facebook and Twitter, there was a giddy optimism that the whole world could finally talk to itself, that the digital town square would be a place of endless perspective and shared humanity. But almost from the start, that dream had a fault line. The very openness that made these platforms thrilling also made them vulnerable. Falsehoods could spread faster than truth, and the algorithms that were built to capture our attention turned out to be wonderfully efficient at amplifying outrage. Then came artificial…