That's why the GP called them a vaccine. To be a vaccine, first it has to be a virus.

There are some odd happening recently that people attribute to fake news (usually with weak evidence, and way too many competing possibilities that they ignore), but I don't think anybody can classify the current world as apocalyptic.

That's an unusual way to describe The Lancet, who are responsible for inflicting Wakefield's bullshit on the world, and taking an eternity to retract it.

That's the point. Accurate, impartial news does not exist and there is no benefit for the majority of individuals to believe that such a thing exists. All news is fake to some extent because there is always room for an agenda. The only reliable way to stop elites from setting the agenda is for people to believe in stuff which conflicts with the agenda. Whether it's fake news or not is a detail which doesn't matter.

People should be encouraged to trust their intuition even if it occasionally leads them to make mistakes.

There's an important difference between people who are genuinely pursuing the truth and those who are genuinely pursuing deception. There's an important difference between a well-intentioned developer who writes a buffer overflow and one who adds a backdoor.

And fake news itself has an agenda: to convince people that there is no such thing as truth, that nothing that the elites say can ever resemble truth, and that caring about what the elites do is futile because the truth is unknowable. Your approach effectively endorses that agenda above others.

The proliferation of fake news doesn't do that. Fake news just reinforces people's biases as they self-select to read a fake news outlet that they agree with, killing any remainder of sceptisism and critical thinking.

> People should be encouraged to trust their intuition even if it occasionally leads them to make mistakes.

That's how it works with real, good-but-not-perfectly-impartial news. Fake news on the other hand is almost entirely lies that remain unquestioned by its consumers, resulting in many many more "mistakes".

From my perspective I am not really afraid of elites per se but false information (or lying people) spreading which enables unsocial and unethical behavior not only to continue but to thrive.

You can compare humanity to a human body... what you are describing is an auto-immune disease where your own anti-bodies are attacking your own body... just because there are cells which are “higher up in the nevous system and decide what the body should do”?

If the cells are working healthily in your interest, let them be... if they are misfunctioning and causing harm, by any means, try to replace them. Throwing around with general terms is not helping anyone in this situation.

How can democracy operate if the levers are broken? What are you voting on if you don't believe that any of the information about candidates is real? Or the content of the laws passed?

That depends on the publisher. Subscription revenue is now 2/3 of the NY Times business as one major example. There are few larger news publishers in the US than the NY Times. As recently as 2005, 2/3 of their revenue came from advertising. That ratio has inverted. The NYT subscribers are on average 30x to 40x more lucrative than the ad-only readers.

The Wall Street Journal has been able to accomplish a similar, gradual build-out of their online subscription business. The Washington Post is pursuing the same model and will likely reach a similar balance on revenue over time.

A good subscription business will always beat a good ad business, unless you're Google or Facebook (in which case their hyperscale enables them to monetize drastically more users than they could with subscriptions).

No coincidence the NY Times has rebuilt their business and their stock is approaching ~15 year highs. Meanwhile, ad businesses like BuzzFeed are in collapse mode (BuzzFeed's ad-based ARPU is less than 1% of what the NY Times derives from its subscribers).

The accessibility and ubiquity of the big names are creating a winner take all scenario. The buzzfeeds, along with traditional regional and local newspaper media, are forced to fight for national advertising income which is becoming less lucrative and more obtrusive by the year. Advertisers have all of the leverage.

Long story short, most for-profit general news media media is in a bad place with no way out.

That's what I would've said a couple of years ago. Now it's clear that fake news is more like a vaccine that really does cause autism.

Why on Earth would you believe such a thing? That's utterly ludicrous.