Comment by evouga

Somebody bears ultimate responsibility for filtering fact from fiction.

It could be the individual consuming the news (which is hard work, and requires consciously counteracting confirmation bias as well as overt attempts at information manipulation).

Or it can be some centralized authority (social media companies, the government, etc.) and you have to ensure that the interests of that authority are aligned with the public interest.

The last several years have illustrated the downsides of the former approach but I'm not at all convinced that the latter is less brittle.