PageRank is a popularity contest, not sure why you’d put so much trust into it as a reliable proxy for content quality. Lots of crap can be popular. Perhaps Google is doing a decent job eliminating crap from their search results (debatable), but that’s not an outcome of a naive application of PageRank.
This event happening tomorrow might be of interest: <a href="https://www.usfca.edu/event/2020-04-29-1200/misinformation-and-covid-19-critical-data-science-approach" rel="nofollow">https://www.usfca.edu/event/2020-04-29-1200/misinformation-a...</a>