I'll give my personal opinion, which you may want to treat as one of many possible viewpoints:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWdD206eSv0 https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/just-go-on-the-internet-and-t...
The internet has run on the concept of trust and reputation for a while now, but IMO, if you want anything close to the full story, you have to put in the work yourself: Compile your sources, evaluate your and their biases, and come to a conclusion. Ground News is a pretty neat tool to help me with this if it's a widely-reported story.
Some examples:
- Something from a reputable news source? Probably true, but not always. I try to wait for a decent handful of other, diverse outlets to report on it before believing it, sharing it, etc.
- Something from a single account on Twitter on Hacker News? Probably not, but not always. I try to wait for other confirmations before believing it, sharing it, etc.
I personally believe it to be a case where free speech wins, people raise the bar for what's worth their trust, and fake news begins to decline as a result -- the opposite being one where people lower their guard due to blind trust in other entities, and fake news can therefore take advantage of that and flourish.
i have to delegate trust and if everyone can and will speak whatever they want - or worse, there are FSB troll farms purposefully injecting noise into any public free speech forum, i can't do that. noise floor raises so high the signal can't be filtered out anymore. what then? we declare 'free speech won' and go home victorious, but without a public forum like HN?