my hot take this morning is that the spread of misinformation and the push to get folks to fact-check everything they see is less about "people being stupid" and more about our very necessary reliance on community being ill-suited to modern capital-driven news dissemination at best, and exploited by bad actors at worst.
it is genuinely just completely impractical to expect everyone to start fact-checking everything they see, "especially if it reinforces their existing beliefs!". we encounter new information constantly, and not just online! humans are always, always learning, and that's even more true in community spaces & interactions with other people.
stopping to fact-check every single thing we learn is not just impractical because it's time consuming, it's impractical because we often don't even know we're learning something. for everything you notice you're learning, there are so many things you're absorbing without realizing it; often layers upon layers of meaning and connection that you don't realize you're making.
we form trusting relationships with people and learn through them- through our communities- because that's the most efficient and effective way to make sure we're getting the best information we can. it makes the process of learning new things much smoother and safer; this person is trustworthy, so I don't need to question everything they say, so I can focus my energy on learning without having to constantly worry about the quality of information I'm taking in.
and if I could dip my toe outside of my immediate lane for a moment, I'd wager this is why so many cultures have versions of elders, mentors, and members of a community entrusted with curating, safeguarding, and disseminating a community's knowledge (the examples that come to mind for me are indigenous elders of North American cultures I'm a little more familiar with, or Babaylans of indigenous Philipino cultures). I also would not be surprised if this is at least part of why lying is such a taboo in so many cultures.
so then we meet capital-driven news dissemination: headlines designed to get clicks and views, because that's where their revenue comes from. sensationalized news segments and stories to keep people watching through the commercial breaks, because that's where their revenue comes from. outright lies on social media designed to gain followers and subscribers and views, because that's where their revenue comes from.
capital is prioritized over quality of information, and all of these news outlets and social media personalities are incentivized to cultivate the same trusting relationships we'd seek out in the people we get out information from, because that's how they keep us there, because that's where their revenue comes from.
and, on the worse end: radicalization efforts focus on building trusting relationships to then teach people flawed and harmful information, once again taking advantage of the ways we as humans rely on community to learn. oftentimes these radicalizing figures are themselves seeking revenue moreso than their own ideological goals; plenty of right-wing figures plainly do not believe the shit they spout, but they make bank on protein powder sales, so they do it anyway.
the point I'm making is that this stuff may not be entirely new- bad actors, at least, have always been around in one way or another- but the root of the problem is not that people are "stupid", or that our critical thinking skills have been eroded. the problem is that we rely on community to learn, and that's being exploited.
and the solution is not going to be a pivot to highly individualistic ways of thinking, living, and learning. it's not going to be the expectation that every single individual person fact-checks every single thing they hear or learn, for themselves, without ever allowing themselves to trust anything or anyone else- and if they fail to do so, well, that's on them for being gullible, uneducated, and/or just a shitty person. neoliberalism is what got us into this mess, and it isn't going to get us out.
we need to build community-focused education practices, and community-oriented fact-checking and critical thinking efforts. education that is not profit-motivated, spaces where we strive to teach each other and learn together, and critical literacy that builds on and strengthens our connections, rather than ridiculing each other for failing to do as individuals what we are only capable of as communities.
