I wouldn't ban anything. What we need is a bit of trust in some institutions. There is a rather obvious difference in quality going from, say, The New England Journal of Medicine to http://thespians-against-government-mind-control.hoax.
It is impossible for you to independently verify even a tiny fraction of what you read/hear on a daily basis. Therefore, you need proxies that can be trusted. These proxies can be evaluated by their performance over time, and there should be many, and they should compete for your trust.
This is exactly how everybody is already operating, almost all the time: when your spouse asks to borrow your car, you will probably give it to them. Because they have a track record of giving it back, and a long-term interest that outweighs any momentary impulse to just sell it and go on vacation. If a stranger on the street asks the same, you will be more sceptical.
That’s a utopian view though. Institutions that were trustworthy became untrustworthy over time because of their own current actions. Who is in charge of establishing truthiness?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes.
Who watches the watchmen.
The only logical and rational way to disseminate information in a free society is you put it all out there and let people make up their own damn minds.
I know it doesn’t appeal to the control freak side that is scarily manifesting itself everywhere lately, but if our schools were more focused on education instead of politics, logic instead of propaganda, we wouldn’t need to control narratives, we could just entrust people to make their own decisions.
It is impossible for you to independently verify even a tiny fraction of what you read/hear on a daily basis. Therefore, you need proxies that can be trusted. These proxies can be evaluated by their performance over time, and there should be many, and they should compete for your trust.
This is exactly how everybody is already operating, almost all the time: when your spouse asks to borrow your car, you will probably give it to them. Because they have a track record of giving it back, and a long-term interest that outweighs any momentary impulse to just sell it and go on vacation. If a stranger on the street asks the same, you will be more sceptical.