The uncomfortable truth is that a large proportion of the population that would formerly have been peripherally interested in current affairs, perhaps watching the news on TV once in a while, and rarely reading newspapers (which had a massive barrier to entry) are now being force-fed information. Many don’t have well-developed critical thinking skills, and rarely needed them before the current era.

The idea that the answer to bad speech online, is more speech, is BS, because a truly unfiltered medium would be overwhelmed with spam, as USENET was, so there have always been algorithms on social media curating and controlling what people saw. If these algorithms can’t distinguish satire from reality, neither will many who who consume their outputs.

So we’re at the mercy of ignoramuses, fed garbage by algorithms programmed by people with (ahem) limited people skills, and being gamed by sophisticated propagandists. God help us.