People seems to believe in everything because it is too difficult to think
You would say the young generation we have to rely on, the generation that is not yet polluted with whatever goes on in the world. But here also, I have my doubts. Recently I saw a whole range of youngsters (students and all) claiming COVID is a hoax. Hopefully this is just a small minority in their age group.
That said, I don't think the widespread use of social media instead of the traditional, more curated channels, are helping. As we all know, social media is even worse (I think: much worse) than the main stream media in terms of luring people into a tunnel. whatever tunnel of information it is.
I've experimented myself a little bit with FB last half a year. The moment I started to like some fake news story, quickly I got a lot of similar stories in my timeline, at the top, or close to the top, pushing my friends posts down to the bottom of my feed. Same happens with my experiments by liking and commenting to posts of FB friends I rarely had in my timeline before. These experiments and FB behaviours showed me FB doesn't care what is in the top of my timeline, my friends with whatever they post, real news, or fake news. FB algorithms seems to work in a way it quickly reacts to changes in my usual patterns and bring me more of the same to what I reacted to recently.
Similar I see with Twitter: Ran some experiments with that service as well. Seems Twitter takes a little longer to adjust to changes in my normal patterns, but still, also at Twitter it's easy to create a tunnel for ourselves.
The problem though: We can't stop technology. We can't stop usage of social media. And we seem to have to deal with people who consume and make whatever they consume their own, instead of first questioning the information we consume before we decide to make it our own or not.
At moments when I'm not thinking too positive, all of this scares me a lot since curating the timelines by organisations will be the only way forward. That in itself will drive more people to shit on all these services (but still continuing using it), and more and more people will find platforms like we have here (HIVE), not curated, with so it seems (to me) a larger percentage of users living in their own tunnels of fake news and being vocal about it, spreading their words and all.
I really hope we can stay away from a path to full control of information, but in those moments I can't believe we are heading to something else than just that.
Sad, very Sad :(