In other words, young people who have grown up in the Internet era still need to learn about checking sources, finding information sources off the Internet, and cooling their emotions and tribal allegiances before deciding complicated issues of social policy. That's not news to anyone who reads Hacker News regularly. Every political movement and every electoral campaign for public office has a tendency to try out various persuasion strategies, empirically, seeing what works by looking at the results of campaigns. Voters who are resilient to the spreading of rumors are still the best protection for free and fair elections. One thing that helps voters become more skeptical is the back-and-forth of competing campaigns, so I'm not sure that the "social media manipulation" mentioned in the article is any more inherently dangerous than the inflammatory political cartoons of the early nineteenth century.