The sources of misinformation that thrived in Parler

Has the free expression of all ideas through current means allowed rational minds to prevail? It seems that the status quo has failed to facilitate rational discussion.

And what sort of metric would we use to evaluate the success of a community to have rational discussion?

I know what it like to be under such information cycle. You just spiral out of control as you become unmoored from reality. Depression and anxiety sets in, and it get worse and worse until the cycle get disrupted or something really bad happen. In my case, I was able to disrupt the cycle.

Imagine someone more susceptible to conspiracy theories get sucked into such a cycle when youtube video recommend an endless stream.

When a website remove links from the front page or from the algorithm, they are necessarily choosing something else to say, unless they really do run out of content.

well there's two answers to that question. Either the society you're talking about is in fact not the 'most modern' society on the planet, or having evidence at the tip of your fingers doesn't make you more informed.

Spoiler alert, it's both. American society has a knack for conspiracy theories, rugged individualism and responding to expert recommendations with contrarianism. I've seen no other place whose response to climate change is not just mere indifference, but coal rolling.

Secondly, and this is not America's fault, people don't do that well with a surplus of information. Even smart people don't. Experiments have shown that the mathematical intuition of statisticians is not much better than a laypersons, and modern behavioural science has highlighted the extreme cost of choice.

Achen and Bartels in their most recent book have shown that folk theory of democracy is largely a myth. People are not naturally enlightened. Being more engaged and higher educated actually leads people to hold more false opinions on politically charged factual matters. (Highly educated Democrats tend to overestimate how homophobic Republicans are, highly educated republicans are climate deniers more often than working class ones).

Reason is indeed slave to the passions as Hume had already figured out and trying to cure motivated and psychologically biased reasoning with more information is going to make the problem worse, not better.