I Was a Facebook Fact-Checker (2019)

In other words, I daresay that people of less education and less experience reading (or where the article is written in a language which is not the reader's first language) would not realize it is satire.

This has happened many times where certain political groups have promoted Onion stories that appear to favor their policies - but which are clearly satire to some of us.

So even if the fact checkers could stay on top of the flood of misinformation, I expect there could be a minimal formula for getting content marked as Satire while still delivering false information to gullible/ignorant readers.

A problem too great (or late) to solve is the relative ignorance of many of the readers. These are also the people who vote in politicians who work directly against their needs. When a person can stand in a burning building and say, "We're sure glad we got our guy leading the government, because those other guys would have ruined everything we care about." No amount of fact checking can solve this mental problem.

I'd like to be more specific than "a huge proportion" but it's hard because I've mostly read the more widely shared and thus sensationalist stories, which will have much bigger distortions on average.

With the scientific studies, we see here on HN all the time how studies, viewed from various angles, can be contentious and not easy to decide with certainty about.

And surprisingly, quotes and "what I saw" situations often do get remembered differently for two people observing the same event. There's a lot of room here for some seemingly simple facts to be very difficult to know the actual fact of.

Good luck trying to teach a >20 year old this.

When you teach children that the scientific method is useless, logic is not necessary, and therefore Creationism is fine, repairing that "damage" once Children are older is pretty much impossible.

You have "habituated" them to the lie, just in the exact same way that "child soldiers" and "terrorist" get habituated. Part of the habituation process is making them personally invested on the lie, e.g., for a child soldier or a terrorist that's their first "kill". From that moment on, either they are right, or they are a horrible human being.

Same here, it might start with Creationism, then shaming someone for wanting an abortion, etc. One of these is going to be their first "kill" moment, their point of no return, and then the only way to "heal" is for them to discover that they are horrible human beings. Pretty much impossible to heal in practice.

In the exact same way that this is not the child soldiers fault, it is not the fault of children that have been educated their way to end up raiding the capitol. I'd go as far that it is not the fault of these children to even then lobby as adults for the process to continue, for more creationism, for more extremism, etc.

Maybe at some point someone in the USA was at fault for allowing this to happen. But at this point I think that a big part of the population particularly in central america are just victims of the system. They were raised into what they are now, and lots of psychological hard work would be required to "fix" any single one of them.

Simplifying this issue to "this people are just dumb, and facebook should send them a link to a page that teaches them how to read" would be as effective as trying to address terrorism by repeating on TV that killing people is bad.