>This is one of the reasons I believe social media sites should enact age-based voting. Such that older accounts that have withstood the reputational scrutiny, have greater influence.
Then those accounts just become hot commodities, or you front load a bunch of accurate reporting about banal stuff and bank that credibility for when you want to go fangs out.
Think about it, that's how we've gotten into the "post-trust" situation we're in now. Age does not against bullshittery confer protection. No technical measure will. No edifice is permanent except that in the churn, some people with standards will rise in spite of it all. They'll get torn at at every opportunity, but it's also why critical thinking is everyone's job. You can't delegate it. Nobody can be a habitual follower by default. You have to check.
So many firms exist with the sole purpose of perception/crisis management simply because it is so powerful a tool. No one can protect you from having to think and come to your own conclusions. I thought differently for years. That the media could be trusted for having skin in the game, and dedication to the ideals and tenets of their profession.
Then I learned about how crushlingly pragmatic the world is. Either you acknowledge it, and plot your way around it, or you get run over by it.
I leave with a few quotes and a rather notorious person who rammed home an illustration of this point.
>In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.
-Abraham Lincoln, Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858, Debate with Stephen Douglas
>Whatever is right can be achieved through the irresistible power of awakened and informed public opinion. Our object, therefore, is not to inquire whether a thing can be done, but whether it ought to be done, and if it ought to be done, to so exert the forces of publicity that public opinion will compel it to be done.
-William Randolph Hearst, unpublished editorial memorandum, date unknown
>"You furnish the pictures, and I will furnish the war."
- also William Randolph Hearst
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/173692
Make no mistake. The Fifth Estate is a pseudo-Governmental entity for a reason, and as a citizen, demands due diligence before letting one's sense of the world get run away with.