[repolfx]

A lot of information is verifiable, it's just people don't do it. You're right that it's often because they want to believe.

Read any story that involves Russia and spend a few minutes doing fact checking. Or check back after a week. You'll find the story is very likely to be factually wrong and might have been retracted.

You don't need anything more than Google to reveal that the stories are false, sometimes not even that - just reading the story carefully and watching for internal contradictions is sufficient. But almost everyone I meet believes these stories completely.

For some reason lots of people desperately want to believe that Russia is the bogeyman. They not only won't use simple and easy tools available to them, they actually get upset when other people do it.