This has sparked me to think about all the platforms disallowing political content during election season. I know personally google shut down ads for popular content that highly sourced and generally accepted as fact, but because of the climate shutdown.
At this point I’ve been contemplating that maybe we are wrong. Fact checking and suppressing articles on these platforms feels like a good thing to do; but we can now see even with those measures an abnormally large portion believes obvious and blatant lies.
The fundamental problem is fact checking and suppression are an intellectual fight to a system of belief, and in that fight intellectualism never wins, never has. Flat earthers will not accept science, antivaxers will not accept science, people claiming a rigged election will not accept facts, and putting up warnings are ignored because it doesn’t fit the belief
Platforms are just the megaphone, and even when that megaphone is turned off the believers will find what they need to fit their system of belief. In the short term the fight needs to happen at the source; Fox, OAN, Brietbart, etc.... as long as the content is being generated people will find it to validate their belief system. Facebook, Twitter, et la are hardly blameless but the attack on them we can see didn’t stop the problem