> People need to be trained
But, hmmm, I don't think a call for education is a solution. That's basically whack-a-mole. Stupid people are born every minute, there's no stopping stupid. Better to put bumpers on them and keep the rest of us safe.
Not a whit.
It's been a hobby horse of mine for the last two decades. From Mk Ultra to Potempkin Villages to Contemporary Psyops, propaganda has provided nearly limitless dark entertainment for me. In fact I've sculpted my own aphorism:
"Intelligence has the ability to construct reasonable sounding reasons for anything." It might have been pithier in an earlier iteration, but that's the gist.
In the end education is expensive and there's no end run around that. In the end there's no algorithm for the truth and there's no end run around that either.
Less free stuff. Free online stuff does not feed quality. Money is the tie that binds. And free stuff binds us to advertisers. Youtube, twitter, facebook, etc, all go to paid tiers and registered accounts.
Eradicate the widespread use of comments. I hate to sound like an old, but go back to established gatekeepers for commentary like well educated editors at newspapers and magazines. Everyone doesn't need a publishing platform.
If that sounds class-ist I guess it kinda is, in a way. Everyone will still have access, but not everyone needs a voice because the structure to support that is corrosive as we've seen.
What I think is possible:
Like everything we learn mostly by making mistakes. Eventually we'll bang our heads against enough walls to find our way out.
In a generation or two people will discount online speech. Already the youngs are discounting facebook.
There will always be bullying, in person or online. There will always be fraud, in person or online. "Education" isn't a magic wand to sprinkle smart dust over the population. Again, even smart people make fundamental and sometimes existential mistakes.
The best we can do is make it harder for those shitty things to happen by performing tourniquets to the flow of free channels that feed online malignant cancer.
Misinformation is like a virus, and it spreads through a population easiest when they accept and share it. All that takes is for it to confirm some preconceived idea or to flatter them. Critical thinking, or at least base line skepticism, seems like the only inoculation.
You're not wrong that that may be too much to expect from people though.
I swear I'm one step away from asking for a chili recipe and someone responding 'blockchain?'. It's beyond parody at this point - I feel like I'm in some Kafkaesque reality.
People need to be trained to be skeptical of voices online.