Flow of Information

If people understand that their subjective understanding of the world around them must be supported by facts, they will seek out information that aligns with the view they wish to hold and accept it uncritically when they find it.

Given this, constantly attempting to combat misinformation is a fool's errand, because the problem isn't the quality of information that people receive, it's their need to believe certain things about the world. And that's not something that can be controlled by flagging social media posts, or limiting their reach. To create a unified understanding of things across groups, those groups must have a high level of common experience, and this simply isn't the case now, as much as people might be inclined to believe that certain things about the world are self evident.

When I talk the small number of people I know who are really staunch conservatives, they have an outlook on the world that predisposes them to see certain information as correct and true, and other information as falsified, often by bad actors for nefarious purposes. And they have a difficult time understanding that not everyone understands the world that way. The same goes for the people I know who are to the political Left of me; the idea that I'm not just as progressive as they indicates to them that I'm not viewing the world in the way it should be viewed.

All information that a person doesn't directly experience is based on trust. And once sources are labelled as trusted or untrusted, it takes a level of consequences to change that. And usually, that isn't there. When one of my more liberal friends tells me that the Federal government colluded to with the banks to ensure that no bankers are held accountable, the penalty for them being wrong about that is effectively non-existent. Likewise when a conservative friend tells me that I'm wrong about the meaning and intent of "woke," because of something they heard on television, it doesn't make a difference in their day-to-day lives that they're wrong.

That's not something that's going to change anytime soon. The fact that the consequences of people's false beliefs tend to fall on other people is an unfortunate fact of life. But it's what we have to change in order to lessen the impacts of bad information on society as a whole.