Propagation is a lot easier now than it was a decade ago, and it's much more organically targeted at individuals already open to the message within. When your social media contacts share things with you, it's likely you're aligned with that message to some degree.
I've been reading about a push in machine learning academia to build models that can flesh out fake news vs. real news. The idea would be that social media sites could adopt those models and clean things up a bit.
The problem is that those who want to believe conspiracy theories will just assume it's a form of censorship, and will continue to distrust the media. The media who, incidentally, is democracy's true protection against the government.
In Psychology it's called "confirmation bias". Many people are predisposed to believe things that fit ideas they already have.
A percentage of the population now believes that a large chunk of the media is lying and only a small segment tells the truth. That small segment has been telling anyone willing to listen for almost 30 years that they are the only ones telling the truth, which incidentally is the first thing a cult leader does too. Not that a segment of the media is a cult, but I think they have borrowed some techniques from cults.
Going back in history, there is always a segment of the population who believes things counter to what the majority of people believe. It seems to be getting worse though.
I don't really have a problem with people coming to a different conclusion if they are basing their conclusions on the same facts the bulk of the population are also getting. I think a healthy society has a range of opinions and we can come to reasonable compromises by sharing opinions and coming to solutions that maybe nobody likes, but most people can live with. That's the way most successful democracies have worked through history.
The problem is a segment of the population who is a minority, but a sizable one, now has decided they can make up their own facts and believe those. When people believe things are facts that are contradictory to what the rest of the population accepts as facts, society has a major problem. We insist schizophrenics be medicated or institutionalized because their brain chemistry leads them to believe their brain noise is factual and they live in a different reality than the rest of the world. Linked with a tendency towards violence, these people are not safe to be in the general population.
The minority who don't accept the same facts as the rest of the population are probably not mentally ill. There may be a few who are, but most have just been isolated in a different media universe and they literally live in a different reality. While they aren't mentally ill, the effect on society has some similarities.
This has happened between societies throughout history. The people who lived in communism really got a different perspective on the world than those who lived in the west. The people of North Korea today live in a different reality than the rest of the world. However the balkanization of the media and the fringe elements making up facts and reporting them as news and the ability for people to isolate themselves in those bubbles is a new phenomenon that was an unexpected side effect of the internet and other changes to the media world.
Of course we see it with Tesla too. This thread is full of people denouncing FUD articles about Tesla. Those articles are written primarily to feed those who already believe Tesla only exists because of massive government subsidies and it would fold like a cheap suit if those subsidies went away. As a bonus these FUD articles rope in a few people who were on the fence too.
The disinformation in the EV world is just a small sample of what's happening in many areas today.
Some kind of real time fact checking these stories would be good for keeping the fence sitters from getting roped in, which is a good thing, but it will likely just make the converted more paranoid and more angry.
