When someone on the street corner tells you the world is ending you ignore them. You dont need a complex technical or social solution.

When someone tells me that xyz plant oil cures cancer or the earth is flat... I ignore them. If I want to be a troll I may play along or challenge them if its fun.

That's the internet. There have always been nutters- they just found other nutters to talk with and you get a loud feedback loop. You can happily mute them still.

I don't think ignoring the nutters is viable. Enough people are believing anti-vax lies to start bringing back deadly disease which affect more than just themselves. Enough people are believing climate change propaganda which is slowly harming the habitability of our planet for our human race.

What was once contained on the internet is leaking out onto the streets and is already affecting you and I in many ways.

Propaganda has always been there.

During the Golden Age of broadcast TV and Radio (pre-internet), the big networks broadcasted plenty of unchallenged lies. The difference now is that laymen can fact check the content put out by the big players. But the price for this is that every troll or nutter has access to the some of the same tools to spread their own lunacy.

I far prefer the current situation over the previous. While it may have felt more comfortable when people believed that news readers were telling the truth or reporting truth, it never was that way.

Trolls (either human or bots) are way more dangerous that TV propaganda because the act as legitimate actors in the public discourse.

It gives them the ability to hide between other people and manipulate the conversation.

It's interesting that you mention climate change in this, I agree that it's ground zero for demonstrating the phenomenon of expressing things as objective truth, or fact, that are much more complex than a simple binary.

>When someone tells me that xyz plant oil cures cancer... I ignore them.

What happens when you see that same person talking to a cancer patient trying to sell them plant oil?

'The world as we know it is ending and people like crmrc114 are to blame. There s/he goes right now, messing up the world as we know it!. You know what to do people.'

Added as we know it because it's actually quite easy to persuade people that what they like about the world is under dire threat, as opposed to the objective existence of the planet or life thereon. People's individual worlds tend to be quite small and it's easy and socially/politically profitable to market to them with threats rather than inducements to expansion with all the unpredictability that entails.

Now, imagine that you've been identified to or by an angry group as the cause of their dissatisfaction. This is a very different dynamic from 'someone on a street corner' that you can usually safely ignore, and against whom you probably feel you could defend yourself if necessary. I don't think you'd be so dismissive of nutters in groups if you were negatively impacted.

What happens when your child, sibling, friend, parent, or lover is saying those things that they got from the internet?

The problem is when people with such beliefs acquire position of power or influence, which sadly has already happened.

When you ignore them you tacitly endorse their position. Their propaganda is being broadcast uncontested, there will be people who believe it. Those people will spread it to other people. Pretty soon whooping cough is back and people are dying.

The truth can't advocate for itself.

>We now have people who 100% believe objectively wrong things and have an obsession to spread their belief as fact.

That's not remotely a new thing. Ever since bits could be sent over the wire we've had Dale Gribbles trying to spread their weirdass conspiracies using the web. Only difference is that back then it existed in the form of homemade webpages with remarkably bad color theory rather than the poorly punctuated social media posts of today.

I think the difference is that it’s not fringe obsessives but rather everyday people spreading bad info. Stuff like QAnon, white nationalism, anti-vax, GamerGate and so on might be mostly started and kept well alive by fringe obsessives but plenty of normal people are sharing their memes, lies and content in an uncritical manner in a way that’s very different to personal websites. Social networks have made it much easier for these lies to be spread and repeated whitewashing their true origins and becoming accepted.

> We now have people who 100% believe objectively wrong things and have an obsession to spread their belief as fact.

There's usually enough truth behind every lie - enough to make it compelling enough to believe in. I'm sorry but I don't think it's as obvious as you're making it out to be. We all probably believe something that's objectively wrong. The truth is really in the middle, but all I see is people going further towards fringe opinions.

I think it's worth expanding your definitions, eg

trolls: people who say absurd or mean things for lulz fools: people who truly believe absurd or mean things because they are naive or gullible scammers: people who say absurd or mean things for profit, and may present as fools or absurdist trolls when challenged