> I don't like private companies getting to decide what's truthful and what's not, but it's not like the US government is doing a better job
If the responsibility has to lie with either one (to police other people's truth, I mean - both have a responsibility not to spew the garbage themselves) then we're screwed. If a majority of the population simply doesn't have the critical thinking and background knowledge necessary to weed out fake news, democracy simply can't work. I would argue we're there in the United States. Too much bias for us to recover from our current politics without very significant changes to our system and / or the population.
> If a majority of the population simply doesn't have the critical thinking and background knowledge necessary to weed out fake news, democracy simply can't work.
One could probably make this same claim about a wide array of things that people are not capable of on an individual basis, yet humanity can typically overcome these with various systemic approaches (why have every individual perform every task, when many can be offloaded to public services).
Does it seem odd that no one's floated the idea that rather than providing information to the public only through a kind of whirlwind of conflicting news flashes and memes, that we also adopt an approach where we endeavour to assemble all important issues into a slowly changing master list, and then off of that we attach news updates, centralized, evidence-based fact checking, public debate & voting, etc? Of course this is extremely far from easy, and is surely impossible to do perfectly, but it doesn't seem at all like a crazy idea to me...and yet, I don't think I've ever heard the idea mentioned.
If the responsibility has to lie with either one (to police other people's truth, I mean - both have a responsibility not to spew the garbage themselves) then we're screwed. If a majority of the population simply doesn't have the critical thinking and background knowledge necessary to weed out fake news, democracy simply can't work. I would argue we're there in the United States. Too much bias for us to recover from our current politics without very significant changes to our system and / or the population.