[tomc1985]

Fake news is the symptom, not the disease.

The disease is that our society is gullible and emotionally fragile, and the people bombarding us with propaganda know this. Fake news is tuned to our weaknesses and to fix this we need to improve ourselves as a society. If we don't then whatever media comes next will be similarly tuned, and the cycle will repeat itself (again), as it nearly always has.

That sounds like a big task, but look the (regretfully temporary) wave of intellectualism that swept across the US in the '60s, in response to russian Cold War Space Race shenanigans

We can do that again... maybe. (There were a lot less conveniences then) But something tells me our society has neither the heart nor the guts to do so.

[guelo]

The human brain is buggy, we're glorified monkeys. You can't tackle societal problems by saying that we need to fix the brains. The history of society and politics is about exploiting those bugs and then, through great deal of effort over centuries, establishing institutions and norms to prevent the exploitation of those bugs.

[Jeff_Brown]

If the bug were entirely process, that might be true. But the bug is largely ignorance. Education, and even more simply communication, have a long way to go. Not to mention technological solutions like sharing a knowledge graph[1].

A genius Haskell programmer and good friend of mine in the south recently said something to the effect of "liberals should give up this effort to ban all guns". The news he watches had characterized liberals that way, and he believed them. I pointed out that almost nobody on the left is gunning for that outcome, as it were, the "bug" disappeared.

[1] https://github.com/synchrony/smsn/wiki

[vectorEQ]

the disease is not that we are gullible or emotionally fragile, that is the 'weakness' which is being exploited. the disease is that people actually want to exploit eachother for their own gains.

[bfuller]

we are addicted to outrage. its mob mentality in the 2000s