But people do have to change. The core problem is a transition from:
- sources being few and somewhat reliable (traditional media), and had reputations to uphold - normal people faced significant barriers to sharing information widely
to a world in which neither of those constraints still holds. And there's no going back, no putting the genie back in the bottle. It turns out that when you give everyone unlimited communication, it exposes weaknesses in how people and societies consume and manage information that were present before but didn't have the environment they needed to materialize. Well, they have that environment now.
There's no going back really unless you want to clamp down on free sharing of information and the "peer to peer internet" in general. People will just have to change their relationship to information. It will take time, but I'm sure we can manage.
Social media and ad tech certainly aren't helping but the root cause is basically technological change and unless you want to roll that back, targeting the companies won't fix it.