> The truth is the vast majority of us are never going to invest time fact-checking or evaluating all the information we consume.

[davesmith@feddit.uk]

The truth is the vast majority of us are never going to invest time fact-checking or evaluating all the information we consume.

It isn't possible for the vast majority of people to fact-check the information they consume online. My guess: you'd conservatively have to spend two hours scanning through academic papers, or more specialist sources you trust, for every one hour on lemmy.

Around fifteen years ago I started learning about climate change. At that point it was an eye opener to repeatedly see almost diametrically opposing headlines based off the same papers. You can't trust 'mainstream media', never mind whatever sources are around now, or bots on social media. Never mind ai.

If there is fault here it is in the amount of information we allow ourselves to be subjected to. A mitigating circumstance is that social media, and sites like feddit.uk, upon which I am reading your post, is addictive. There is a spectrum of addictive behaviour and less overwhelming addictive behaviour has a huge impact on a mass scale.

Us humans are always seeking stuff that gives us a dopamine hit, and if it wasn't social media it would be retail therapy, vaping, caffeine, sex or any number of other engineered substances or behaviours. But given who is controlling information now, the world really would be a much better place with a lot less internet use at this point.