To me this is sort of like saying why do we need seat belts when we could just have people go to the gym so they're strong off to push back an oncoming car. Well, you can't get that strong, and also you can't really educate people well enough to reliably deal with the full force of the information firehose. Even people who are good at doing it do so largely by relying on sources they've identified as trustworthy and thus offloading some of the work to those. I don't think there's anyone alive who could actually distinguish fact from fiction if they had to, say, view every Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/everything post separately in isolation (i.e., without relying on pre-screening of some sort).

And once you know you need pre-screening, the question becomes why not just provide it instead of making people hunt it down?

Because it doesn't seem to work?

Instead of investing resources in education, why not let people discover by themselves the virtues of education?

Sarcasm aside, we tend to focus too much on the means and too little on the outcomes.

Because no one person can fight against a trillion dollar industry who has decided misinformation makes the biggest profit.

How am I supposed to learn what’s going on outside my home town without trusting the media?

That’s hundreds of millions of people in the US, of varying ages and mostly out of school already. Seems like a good thing to try but I’d imagine it doesn’t make a tangible impact for decades.

'An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of the cure.'

It's so much easier to stop one source than it is to (checks notes) educate the entire populace?!? Gosh, did you really say that with a straight face? As if education isn't also under attack?

Because it isn't that simple.

If we could just educate people and make sure they don't fall for scams, we'd do it. Same for disinformation.

But you just can't give that sort of broad education. If you aren't educated in medicine and can't personally verify qualifications of someone, you are going to be at a disadvantage when you are trying to tell if that health information is sound. And if you are a doctor, it doesn't mean you know about infrastructure or have contacts to know what is actually happening in the next state or country over.

It's the same with products, actually. I can't tell if an extension cord is up to code. The best that I can realistically do is hope the one I buy isn't a fake and meets all of the necessary safety requirements. A lot of things are like this.

Education isn't enough. You can't escape misinformation and none of us have the mental energy to always know these things. We really do have to work the other way as well.

Because you want to use it yourself. You can't vaccinate if you rely on the disease to maintain power. You can't tell people not to be afraid of people different than themselves if your whole party platform is being afraid of people different than yourself.

Sorry, 'recognizing disinformation'? You must have meant 'indoctrination'.

(They don't necessarily exclude each other. You need both positive preemptive and negative repressive actions to keep things working. Liberty is cheap talk when you've got a war on your hands.)

Like Biden administration pressured social media to take down information/account that went against their narrative