[skybrian]

It's not that people are "too dumb" but rather that they aren't going to do the work needed to verify a story. How many phone calls do you make to verify something before resharing it? Most people make zero phone calls.

If you don't do the work, there's no reason to believe that you can do as good a job judging plausibility of a story as a good journalist can do. It's not about who's smarter, it's about not having the evidence.

I don't make any phone calls either, but I try to crib from people who do their homework. I also appreciate basic filtering to keep the noise down. It's not that I couldn't do my own spam filtering, but rather I don't want to.