Using your reasoning, you might ask why it's bad to let vulnerable elderly individuals be hoodwinked out of their savings. What happened to their responsibility?
It seems to me that the people as a body are incapable of managing themselves and so they need safeguards. (Wow, that makes me sound like a dictator.)
It's a bit different because in your case, we're actively reducing harm. You can't just say "censorship will fix it" or "oversight will fix it" unless we're talking about specific scenarios. Which is why, in general censorship and oversight doesn't really fix anything.
This is also why laws are very detailed and specific. It would be nice to say "be good to one another" and be done with it.
What could do good? A disclaimer every time you log in saying "Pro tip: get your news from reliable sources, not your facebook feed."? Are there any ways people could be prompted to do the right thing?
The question is then: what can be done? Just because it's hard to know how to handle the problem doesn't mean we shouldn't try to.
Do they? I don't, most of my friends are idiots (and still my best friends) Isn't that their fault however? The government cannot tell you to trust or distrust your friends.
> How do you protect the people who can't use critical thinking to get answers?
It's a scary world when you want the government to tell you what you are allowed to read and believe.
2. I didn't say I wanted the government to tell me or other people what they were allowed to read and believe. I'm saying I somehow want something to be done to help people realize that they can't trust everything they read online for unverified sources.
You're right that the government can't tell us whether to trust or distrust our friends. But can people be taught to think for themselves?
Maybe a better option is adding training to the curriculum specifically designed to teach students how to classify sources by bias and by probable authenticity.
Lack of funding isn't the cause.
Schools in the US receive more funding per pupil than schools in the EU or top performing Asian countries. More directly, the US spends more than Canada and gets far worse results. It's difficult to find the root of problem, but I would blame religiosity and widespread violent crime. Young earth creationists are still doing their best to hamstring the sciences no amount of money spent on a child can make up for a father who is dead or imprisoned.
http://news.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-...
How could the educational system possibly be unaffected by most of the country still denying a foundational part of modern science?
Upon further investigation, we can see that it's not unaffected. Pitched battles are still being waged on intellectual ground settled generations ago in nearly every other developed country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_and_evolution_in_publ...
The reality is that only one of the above opinions, "God created humans directly in their present form" is provable/disprovable in any way and therefore the only one which science has anything to say about.
That said, 42% is still an admittedly high number. But you are the one who fails to understand a foundational part of modern science when you assume that correlation equals causation, and that increased religiosity results in poorer education while failing to realize that both are correlated with increased levels of poverty, which seems far more likely to cause poor education than religion.
With everyone on the web, it turns out that now large meta processes - like elections, are being affected.
At this point, things are no longer the same, and new meta systems are required.
The world changed, and the internet is no longer just for us.