If we simply leave it up to people, we already know the outcome. Some, maybe even a lot of people will take fabricated lies as facts and proceed to engage other people with these facts, sometimes violently.
By doing that we are empowering the people who fabricate lies to move an agenda. It's ridiculously cheap to make fake news and the value gained is immense because people are having a hard time filtering it themselves. It is the social media equivalent of the Mirai Botnet.
Do we want to live in a world where the best lier wins?
We've always lived in a world where the best liar wins. The best liar is in the Whitehouse, we still live in that world today.
The preoccupation with objective truth is a relatively recent notion, and only of interest to what appears to be a minority of the population. The rest are happy to have their biases confirmed, it doesn't much matter whether it's true.
The difference between now and 30 years ago, is that now if someone actually cares about getting to the bottom of something, the tools for doing so are much more accessible, making the ongoing prevalence of bullshit that much more frustrating. We're not getting any stupider, but the gap between the informed and the disinformed or uninformed has widened substantially.
Even here on HN, when it comes to the handful of subjects I'm knowledgable in, it's pretty common to see some masterclass bullshitting holding top spot in a thread.
> We've always lived in a world where the best liar wins.
True, but we also seem to have collectively become a lot more skittish about excoriating bullshit because "everyone does it". That's definitely not the optimal solution.
By doing that we are empowering the people who fabricate lies to move an agenda. It's ridiculously cheap to make fake news and the value gained is immense because people are having a hard time filtering it themselves. It is the social media equivalent of the Mirai Botnet.
Do we want to live in a world where the best lier wins?