For many people, their major source of facts and information is not the news media, which they deem biased, but social media, which they accept as reliable. For that reason, misinformation spreads like Covid-19.
The Cybersecurity for Democracy at NYU studied thousands of Facebook postings from August 2020 through January 2021. In those six months, the height of the Presidential campaigns, they found that misinformation (half-truths, truth-twisting, lies, etc.) were shared and liked 6x (six times) more often than news from actual news sites.
Part of the problem is people’s mistrust of the news media, or reliance only on biased news that supports their own views or promotes misinformation. Part of it is people’s unwillingness to consider the source of “facts”–what agenda the person saying it has–and simply, without thinking, passing it on.
No matter which, we’ve become a nation of lemmings, mindlessly following those who lead us over the cliff into the churning waters below. I’m normally a positive person, but this scares me.