That optimism, particularly in this crowd that likely skews towards techies, may be a significant cause of a solid slice of the world's problems today.

We sometimes like to see ourselves as little Sherlock Holmes' - humans on a trajectory of ever more self-improvement and breathtaking intellect. All data is good data, all speech is good speech, because it feeds the ever improving intellect. Misinformation is at worst a temporary blip that more communication will correct. We're little Googles that slurp up data and spit out ever improving judgements.

But we're not that rational, and not that great at filtering information. We have biases that are trivially exploitable at scale, and we're rather good at building machines or even merely memes to exploit those.

We need to start accepting human cognitive weaknesses, and that includes doing a bit of informational gardening - pruning out the weeds before they choke everything we value. You don't feed ML algorithms maliciously distorted training data and hope for them to nevertheless magically converge to something useful, do you? (And no, GAN ML doesn't do that either yet - but please correct me if I'm behind the times - because the detectors aren't really adversarial but rather specific training targets and thus a detector from one GAN can't detect another's fakes - and in any case, it's all still based on trusted training data - which is exactly what humans don't have).

I don't believe this problem is fixable until we recognize that freedom of speech in an era of mass manipulation via social media is intrinsically dangerous. We all understand the upsides and have been well indoctrinated against risks of government ministries for truth, but the reality is that we're all agents in an immensely complex system where we want certain convergence properties, yet are kind of assuming that specific hyper simplistic policies will achieve those goals - and assuming that almost as gospel. I don't buy that that's going work. I don't think it actually _ever_ worked, which is why we have stuff like fraud statutes, and _do_ penalize lying in all kinds of other scenarios. Even more critically, social _norms_ imposed heavy extra-legal punishment on frauds and other informational polluters. We just turned extreme freedom of expression into an article of patriotism to show we were team america; and to distinguish ourselves from team soviet or team monarchy - but that was (fortunately!) merely skin deep because various legal restrictions actually remained and in any case social punishments matter more than legal ones - and being seen as a fraud or liar _used_ to be a quick way to becoming a pariah.

But without speech-restricting social norms against deception, and with a public attitude that sometimes even _embraces_ falsehood as a symbol of pride for ones rights - well, then truth is optional; and quixotically the _whole point_ of freedom of expression disappears, being that it's a tool to discover and disseminate new insights and burn away corruption via transparency. Speech is irrelevant when the only people listening are those that share your opinion anyhow. And where social norms remain, we've pulled their teeth by accepting that employees have no responsibility for a corporation's actions unless they're very directly linked (e.g. I wouldn't blame a facebook employee personally for facebook-spread misinformation, yet I would if they spread it themselves), yet corporations are increasingly everpresent as tools to mediate daily interactions.

Until we face up to the reality that core founding principles we hang some of our identities on are _actively harmful_ in some scenarios, we're not going to be able to consider how to improve ourselves. Instead, we'll tell ourselves comforting bedtime tales of how people can teach themselves to fend these things off, and how team free speech always wins in the end. Until, one day, it doesn't.