> [insert internet company here] did nothing wrong! It's the reader's responsibility to think critically!
Obviously, there's a lot of truth to that. I'm sure everyone here broadly agrees with the concept of personal responsibility. I just don't see how making this blatantly obvious point gets us anywhere. It's like working with a bad colleague who management won't fire. Of course they're failing at their duties, but so what? You're stuck with them. It seems weirdly nihilistic to just accept the situation, instead of trying to improve it by making the colleague suck less.
Personally, I think it's OK to trust experts. We broadly trust doctors, engineers, researchers and lawyers to inform us about their specific fields. Journalism is different, in part because of the 1st amendment : the government can regulate who's qualified to give you legal advice, but not who's qualified to inform you about geopolitics. That's a feature, with some undesirable side effects. My contention is that curated fact checking is an acceptable, if imperfect, way to mitigate those side effects. Everyone's entitled to an opinion, but not every opinion is entitled to the front page of Google.