> The underlying nexus is that our ideals on free speech do not take into account human wetware bandwidth.
Damn, this is such a good metaphore, I had to think a lot about it.
For my browser [1] I wanted to introduce a fact gathering and linking system, and build it in a way that bias of authors (and publishers) can be guessed when they release a new article.
My theory is that Rationalism will never be anything that can exist, because it is the opposite of human nature (or say, the founding idea of our society).
The underlying issue is that emotions cause a lot of people to get irrational due to them not being able to differ a potentially dangerous situation with a potentially (equally) good one.
I think that most (if not all) of fake news websites were shared because of only a couple of reasons:
1) Humans like to get reinforced in their own perception more than they like to get disagreed with.
2) Articles in these type of publishing mediums appeal to emotions rather than to facts, hence the reason for why they use pictures, videos and other recordings as "evidence" even when they had totally nothing to do with it.
3) Humans are lazy. This is by far the most important point. If it is easy to comply with an emotional statement, and hard to gather evidence to disprove it; the emotional statement will always win.
4) Humans confuse disagreement with punishment. As a kid you get taught that there are negative effects when you disagree with society, or your mum/dad or other authoritarian figures. Rather than to punish kids when they are wrong we should encourage the gathering of evidence, and let them form an argument for both sides.
5) Humans are beings that forget. That is why media for the masses reuses pictures of a situation that happened years ago as "proof" for something clickbaity. Most people won't remember it if it was a situation that had a boring outcome, but they certainly will remember it when it had a negative emotional effect on themselves.
6) Depression is a huge hole where nobody without external support can come out, due to how our thinking nature works. Similar to 5) our brain is wired to remember negative punishments more than positive reinforcements, and that is why we tend to get depressive more likely than we tend to get optimistic...which in turn plays in the cards of fake news because the bad obvious enemy could do some serious bad thing to us.
But yeah, these are just my two cents. Due to my browser I thought a lot about this and came to the conclusion that irrational hate speech is worse an enemy than someone might think on first sight.
[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth