Stamos says the US must ‘come together to protect’ democracy from misinformation

democracy is a popularity contest based on emotion. If you remove emotion you will have something else.

Words "Russian", and "bots" are absolutely irrelevant for the discussion. "Lies" is relevant, but who is the authority to decide what belongs to the category? The whole Free Speech thing is invented exactly because history of humanity many times proved that mandatory filtering of information inevitably leads to abuse, and to lies which you want to counter.

Why am I able to find information I can trust easily, verifiable among many different non-mainstream sources that are nearly always accurate?

The most important thing is to get off Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, etc, find some independent news sites you like, and be very skeptical.

There seems to be a lot of concern trolling over democracy and Western freedoms which soberly urge us to not be so concerned with democracy and Western freedoms and instead accept new, deeper forms of censorship and greater collaboration between state, corporate and intelligence actors regarding the free flow of information in our society.

Stamos' piece in the Washington Post and statements elsewhere are vague, weird and poorly thought-out assertions which demand we accept Russiagate and WikiLeaks source attribution positions favoured by US intel agencies in full, and then only obsess over a very narrow set of concerns.

Analytically-minded technologists are still asking what magical GRU-election-swinging manipulations were just out of the grasp of the multi-billion dollar domestic presidential campaign industry, and why for instance the revelation of corruption within the DNC was the damaging issue, rather than the corruption itself. Stamos says major media 'rewarded the hackers' by reporting truth, and in The Verge's lazy retelling they transmute even this truth into 'misinformation'. It's low quality discussion and debate all around.

If an establishment paper broke the DNC corruption story first and naturally refused to disclose sources, or received them anonymously and so was unable to disclose them, what then?

Is Stamos and the 'Fake News Defense' movement saying we need to end all anonymously-sourced journalism? All investigative journalism? Any journalism which is damaging to key political, corporate and intelligence individuals and entities within the US? Because surely there's a risk that type of journalism may have been aided in some as-yet-unknown way by hostile foreign actors.

How could you definitively prove it was not?

Why not go even deeper into the 'fake news / foreign agents' madness:

Imagine the GRU want the US polity to over-react and implement a draconian press censorship reality 'immune from foreign influence'. In this scenario an even-more-untouchable political / corporate / intelligence class arises and - immune from scandals, consequence and the disinfecting power of transparency - is allowed to ossify in a cesspool of increased corruption and incompetence - weakening the state from the center.

Perhaps we can just go full-circle to this as a public establishment conspiracy theory and have Stamos and intel agencies agreeing that free speech as an inviolable principle is the best defence against whatever bogeyman is in fashion.

Yes, because that's exactly what it is. They are ideas. And you disagree with them.

It's very simple - anyone can assert anything, thus each individual must take it upon themselves to be skeptical of the assertion, or blindly agree with it.

The real problem you're getting at here is that many people are dumb, and may be made to believe anything.

If these people became skeptical or were simply deleted from reality, such bots would have no value.