Back when the Internet first came to be, there was the typical set of blue sky and lollipop predictions that the result would be more facts, less censorship, more intelligent discourse and less successful manipulation.
Being able to converse with each other would lead people to be more honest, and our world increasingly would resemble a utopian ideal of peace and prosperity. Now, decades later, "fake news" has proliferated, censorship is growing stronger, and rather than having politicians who can't handle the truth, we seem to have politicians who have no idea what the truth is.
In fact, instead of becoming more literate, we seem to be regressing. Last week, we discovered that Russia allegedly paid US$100K for ads to piss us off; we saw the emergence of Verrit, a biased news service that Hillary Clinton thinks is a better Snopes; and the rumor spread that Hurricane Irma was a category 6, even though the highest classification for a Hurricane is 5.
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