> Not that much has changed,
A lot has changed. If you didn't like a newspaper or a broadcast, you stopped seeing it. They built a reputation that they had to maintain somewhat. You knew most of the time who was behind each piece.
Now? You see content that a lot of people dislike because it generates controversy and engagement and attacks, lies get way more exposure than truths. A lot of publications come from unknown sources, with no reputation, so they can lie without consequences. You don't know who wrote something and the interests they might have.
> The best and only way to defend and nurture it is education. Teach people to think for themselves, critical reading,logic and analysis.
What is more probable, that social media has completely changed the type of content that people see or that education has plummeted in a decade or two?
Education is not the solution: no single person can be educated enough to make informed decisions on all the topics they are exposed to in a single day. We don't even have the time to do that! We need to revert the changes that social media has created in our information diet, that's the solution. And we need to start by forcing social media companies to stop maximizing engagement over everything, show people only the content they explicitly subscribed to (no 'look at this comment someone made on this post of a page you don't follow'), and stop editorializing the priority of that content via algorithms to maximize engagement.