[matthewdgreen]

“Never taking anything you read or hear at face value” makes it impossible to operate in a functioning society. This is particularly the case in a society where some people are happy to fill your information channels with conflicting information. Even if you do your research and reject some of the bad data, the effort will paralyze you (and others like you) which is almost as good from a malicious perspective.

Or to think about it from an information security perspective, once you adopt a specific defense mechanism, someone will look for ways to exploit it. This one is particularly easy to exploit.