That's not what's happening right now, though. What's happening right now is that people are turning to less credible news sources and are growing increasingly misinformed. It means a guy like Alex Jones can't be run out of town even if what he's saying is complete nonsense, because he can always turn to the internet.

Plus, trolls funded by very well endowed state actors can now pretend to be among those "independent journalists" and completely muddy the waters.

Humanity doesn't always evolve for the better. The developed world lives in an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity, but don't make the mistake of believing that progress is the norm or that we've reached the end of history. It's possible to throw it all away with stupidity, propaganda, greed and infighting, and I have no doubt humanity is fully capable of reverting to that. In fact, given a long enough timeframe it's probably inevitable.

> We'll develop consensus systems that will be better than the old system.

Oh yeah, so the blockchain will somehow save this? (cough)

The best "consensus" system we've got for social media / forums is the upvote / downvote and that is a horrible indicator of truthfulness / factfullness / quality of something. Upvote / downvote is only an indicator of the prevailing groupthink on any given forum -- it is not a substitute for a reality check.