[choward]

As much as I dislike facebook, I think the root problem is the lack of critical thinking many people have. Our education system that's optimized for standardized tests don't really help with that.

For example when I state opinions I don't expect everyone to take them as fact without doing their own research. But that's pretty much what a lot of people do.

Doing your own research should be the norm (your already using the internet!) with any opinions you read like on Facebook. But there are sources you should be able to take seriously like the government. However, there is one government official that straight lies on Twitter all day and a good majority of the country believes him. When you believe that it's a lot easier to make the jump to believe everything you see on Facebook.

One thing Facebook should do is make the news feed fully configurable and deterministic so you only see things from people you know in a non biased way. That will never happen since that's a big part of their business model.