The way I see it, this problem is unsolvable. The issue is that the human species simply isn't equipped to deal with the modern information age.<p>Biologically, we're still hunter gatherers, cognitively optimized to deal with tiny scale societies and its limited information diet.<p>Even in our area of culture (since only 10K years ago, start of agriculture) we dealt with almost no information at all. What we consume in information in a single day now is the information load of an entire year just centuries ago.<p>Even in my lifetime, early 80s, information was limited, and slow. When I grew up, we had 3 national TV channels, a few magazines, and a library of dated books.<p>The current age is not "business as usual", it's brand new. Information is unlimited. Information moves at breakneck speed. Information has broken free from institutions, all citizens are producing it. Information has no accountability, anybody can say anything.<p>We're not equipped for this. We don't "scale" in this way. That's why I don't see a true solution. But that doesn't excuse us from trying...<p>Academics should produce more idiot-proof takes that are proportional, connect with the real world and include counter points, rather than producing a simplistic paper for the sake of producing a paper to meet some perverted internal metric. The emphasis should be truth and the purpose of it, outcomes, not checklists.<p>Traditional media should stop turning themselves into a Twitter account or juicy Tumblr blog. Stop thinking in narratives and us versus them type of reporting as is so typical of US media.<p>Social networks should ban paid advertising for anything that has a societal impact. Further, social networks should stop rewarding the most extreme, dumb, controversial opinions to the mainstream as this normalizes outrage, division and minsinformation. The reasonables should win, not the crazy ones.<p>This last part is perhaps key. There will always be misinformation but the way it spreads is the real issue.<p>Say a controversial character has 100K followers. The character posts something new and it's now anyone's guess how many of their followers see it. My guess is that it's fairly low, perhaps 10K. If it would end here, it's fair game.<p>But that's now how this works. At all. There's a retweet button. This single button brings it under the eyes of countless additional audiences, and it spreads like wildfire. Because the take was controversial. As part of this effect, the character gets even more followers, and so on.<p>At the end of the day, you basically take a village idiot that would normally be completely isolated in their opinion, and hand them the microphone to address an audience of millions.<p>In fact, the only reason this person had 100K followers to begin with was because of this effect: richly rewarding controversy, bad takes, etc.