Every contentious issue in US politics gets divided into two major camps, each championed by one of the major political parties. Those parties use their resources to plant the seeds of powerful echo chambers, which eventually become self-perpetuating thanks to our natural tendencies for group preferences and confirmation bias. The misinformation crisis is just a result of an echo chamber throwing crap at the wall to avoid questioning itself.

The problem of echo chambers is a hard one to solve, especially when it comes to politics. However, I think an improved voting system would actually do a lot to help in the long term. By introducing a transferable vote, citizens could vote for third-party candidates without fear of "wasting" their vote. Over time, that should hopefully empower more moderate political groups and make the middle ground between echo chambers more accessible.

A more accessible middle ground should result in fewer echo chambers. Fewer echo chambers should result in less incentive to create and circulate misinformation. At least, that's my two cents.

Curious of your thoughts there.

Ironically, if YouTube really wanted to help, they could just stop trying to "engage" users based on their political preferences. As if that would ever happen.

Any time I watch a video from CNN, Fox, or NBC, YouTube suggests political crap for weeks afterwards. I bet political content is one of their most "engaging" subjects, so I doubt Google would ever do the responsible thing and put a stop to that.

Modifying the algorithm to show "both sides" instead might help, but I don't think that would do much to encourage a middle ground. I'm worried both sides would just get more and more extreme.

Yeah, that ain't happening. We need some FCC laws around targeted content to audience (spawning echo chambers) to optimize engagement.