IMHO this obsession over fake news sort of misses the point. People are hurting, and they don't have strong communities to support them. Instead, folks who are hurting are huddling together online and perpetuating ill-adaptations. Add to that grifters that are trying to take advantage and you've got heart-rendering pandemic of paranoia that are ripping families apart and destroying lives.
People don't realize how much being part of an amateur soccer league or ham radio club or just any community increases our resilience as a society.
>People are hurting, and they don't have strong communities to support them.
Strangely your comment holds true in areas where community means you get many different perspectives.
In my experience (growing up in the south), it's "strong-knit" communities that are doing the most harm in perpetuating mistaken beliefs or amplifying anger.
What's especially weird is that this holds true when some communities' economic status is considerably better than the majority of the country!
There's a momentum behind beliefs that get culturally amplified. And it's hard to disagree with people when you don't have immediate examples to compare and contrast. Or worse, when your very livelihood gets threatened for going against the flow.
My own experience (given the above) is why I'm eternally grateful for the unfiltered internet I had when I was growing up. I wouldn't be half the person I am today without the many varied perspectives that I had access to per-social media bubbles.
I love that you've pointed out a way that having a community can be harmful as well.
One can have a community that isn't supportive, and that can be harmful. As you point out, you're grateful you were able to have access to other communities that helped you in life.
One can have a supportive community that is supporting something that might be harmful, as well. I got out of the community that raised me quick as lightning. They were decent, good-hearted people; they just had different ideas what they were willing to accept out of members of their community.
It's very much a Goldilocks problem. Everyone needs to find the community that's "just right", and that's hard. Even with the internet, because it's so easy to find the harmful but supportive communities.
And if you can't find community, create one. Start a club and people will join. It might seem silly, but if you're doing something, get others to join. Lots of people are looking for something, anything, to feel connected.
>People are hurting, and they don't have strong communities to support them. Instead, folks who are hurting are huddling together online and perpetuating ill-adaptations
This kind of blase generalization is rather silly but all too common. It also presupposes that some general fix, preferably delivered by someone "who knows better" is in order. People in general are many different things at different times, each with their own variable causes and fixes that are mostly contextual in specific ways.
There's no shortage of community today, both of the literal physical kind and more recently even in a digital version, and if people are "hurting" for lack of community, then they're doing so no more than they would have in the past when establishing contact with others for friendship, shared ideas and love was much more labour intensive.
Also, if you think ill-adaptations, ignorant beliefs and paranoias are common today, you should take a closer look at most of history, in which entrenched interests of all kinds promoted all sorts of false beliefs, xenophobias, paranoias, nationalistic shit and other grossly dishonest beliefs across the board. They were pervasive, harder by far than today to counteract and much more widely entrenched. Large swathes of the population held these beliefs with terrible outcomes in many cases and if anything, it's something that's now decreasing like never before despite all the politically-biased screeching about fake news and "misinformation", often used as a justification for exactly the kind of limited, controlled and more centralized information distribution that used to REALLY promote enforced community and lies for the sake of political interests.
Even well-recognized psychological models have shown that people are smarter than ever, in general and in many specific ways. The Flynn effect has been well documented and though it has a number of likely causes, one of them is surely access to a far broader plurality of information and cultural exposure, with both the bad and the good (however you want to define those).
Moreover, at least now, whenever some idiotically wrong, self-serving or viciously dishonest belief gets promoted by certain groups, counter-groups can form to discredit it and allow for some genuine diversity of ideas, though many call this by another grossly simplistic but insult term, "polarization", which apparently should be eliminated so we can all believe supposedly correct things (though as defined by some specific self-interested agenda or another).
No thanks, I prefer a world in which someone who generalizes that people are hurting can't easily force them to connect, read, view and think in specific ways as decided by someone else until that authority smugly decides they're no longer hurting.
People don't realize how much being part of an amateur soccer league or ham radio club or just any community increases our resilience as a society.