[anenefan]

Smart phones probably allowed a greater saturation of a person's time with the internet, esp social media areas purposely stoking engagement with the user. I personally know too many people in real life practically married to their phone who recite any number of things from someone they absolutely believe, wholeheartedly accept the person has some apparent title of expertise, rather than the facts as per a well accepted book or area of printed knowledge. It's perplexing but I know the same ... er ... tool with their apparent title were saying the same in an area back in 2004 for instance, they'd be rubbished via a fairly active discussion vetting most of their inaccuracies - some people used to just have nothing better to do at nights than fix up BS.

I wish I could find more and clearer discussions in regard to when this came in and why. ( I lament the lack of a decent search engine present time - there were at least in 2007 numerous discussions in regard to the changes made in the US at the time, the follow though with software updates in regard to terms of service etc.)

Turns out it started in 2006 [1] [2 - is a bit fuzzy but] ... I though should recall the time as I was following the proceedings and when the decision was announced I was frankly appalled and ranted numerous times when the subject came up at various discussion boards lamenting Facebook seemed to have buttered up the legal areas to save them a lot of money on real live moderators to manage disagreements.

But 2007 seems stuck in my head though, as to me it was 2007 when the real fallout started when it started to roll various discussion sites that engaged in freer speech with robust discussions, occasional flames - to the point forum admins and staff of various message boards, forums using software such as phpbb had to decide the best approach to keep everyone happy and not end up dealing with legal threats.

Now getting back to noted decline in common knowledge and people more readily believing BS and why this law changed how dynamics of how fact challenges worked in Facebook. Once the anonymous common intelligence fighter might have posted factual informative links on someone's facebook wall that's ignorantly alleging total BS ... or maybe by purpose running a scam ... and factual challenges generally irritated them and blocking didn't generally work in the long run as it wouldn't be long before someone else was offended by their sheer lack of fact checking ... but after the rule change - the honestly deluded, the scammer or the bullshitter merely had to hit the report button on the anonymous users comment ... and that anonymous account was more or less gone, not a threat to challenge any BS on Facebook until they legitimised their account. Again it was 2007/8 I recall a number of former Facebook users expressing their dismay they'd lost their anonymous Facebook account, given they preferred their relative anonymity.

[1] https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopic.php?t=84680

[2] https://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_01_08-2006_01_14.sh...