This is all inevitable. At worst it's pulling the issues forward by a few months or years, and I don't think anyone will meaningfully address the problem until it's staring us in the face.
I believe the internet needs a distributed trust and reputation layer. I haven't fully thought through all the details, but:
- Some way to subscribe to fact checking providers of your choice.
- Some way to tie individuals' reputation to the things they post.
- Overlay those trust and reputation layers.
I want to see a score for every webpage, and be able to drill into what factored into that score, and any additional context people have provided (e.x. Community Notes).
There's a huge bootstrapping and incentive problem though. I think all the big players would need to work together to build this. Social media, legacy media companies, browsers, etc.
This also presupposes people actually care about the truth, which unfortunately doesn't always seem like the case.