[richcollins]

Building tools for fact-checking and helping people decipher fact from fiction will become increasingly important to keep the electorate informed

Sadly the electorate doesn't care about being informed. They seek out news that confirms their world view. Any information that contradicts their world view is deemed "fake news".

[TeMPOraL]

People usually believe what their friends believe - information is used to make social objects and ways of doing social signalling, not to get at hard facts.

A lot of bullshit starts to fly around when you have two or more stable "positions" around a subject in a society. People divide into sides and keep using information only to signal to which side they belong.

This leads me to (maybe a pretty dumb) idea: what if we found a way to destroy such stable positions? Destabilize them, so that people couldn't stubbornly signal their support for a single side? Of course all sides would end up using such a tool to destroy their "opponents"; I feel like this could lead to two outcomes: a) (bad) there aren't any stable positions anymore, and b) (good) the positions keep getting disrupted until they rearrange into one that is actually aligned with the facts.