What's with this new trend of "how do we know what's fake or real?!" - am I going crazy or was this stuff was taught in high school? This is why we wrote papers

What's with this new trend of "how do we know what's fake or real?!" - am I going crazy or was this stuff was taught in high school? This is why we wrote papers, to learn critical communication skills (as writer and reader). We determine what is fake in the same we we always did. Sanity checking the authors, validating for self-consistency, cross-checking evidence, searching for conflicting interests, and evaluating probable accuracy based on those factors. The paradigm shift is the Internet as a whole: democratizing dissemination of information. Facebook, email, same thing. We're now flooded with noise from random anonymous un-credentialed entities, unable to track and filter out low-signal sources. The public is the new broadcast medium... the narrative becomes whatever resonates strongest with some subpopulation, rapidly spread through the wires by people who never critically analyze agreement. Old news institutions at least held some degree of credibility... plenty of faults, from simple mistakes to missed coverage to occasional outright propaganda (generally corporate) - but there was accountability. John Doe wrote for The City Times, you learned to ignore the bad reporters and institutions, and if we go back far enough you could actually talk to them in-person. Every democratization comes with a social challenge of creating norms to maintain order. Political democracy is a work in progress, economic democracy currently not viable, I guess this signals it's time for us to face information democracy...