My personal solution is to stay off ALL big-tech/algorithm-driven social media, get my news from a personally curated handful of legit outlets, and fact-check constantly because I know I’m not immune.

It takes a great deal of time and care, as does anything worthwhile when our government abdicates its responsibility to the common weal, but I’m old enough to know nobody’s gonna do it for me.

If I could do it for the rest I would, but even then you’d still have the same problem: one person deciding what the rest consume.

The best form of content administration is community based, where the entire group is both empowered and invested in curating what is consumed. But with this insane amount of money and power being generated by and for big tech through keeping it as-is, we have what we have: a situation where you can’t even report obviously bad content and expect it to be removed; where you have to realistically expect that a given percentage of the accounts you see are not human and even known bad actors, allowed to remain because they are profit-generating to the platform.

For us in the US, because we had it so good for so long, there is actually a clear path to recovery: get rid of Citizens United and similar corrupt rulings that assign the rights and protections of real person to corporations; come back to a transparent and community-oriented FCC; return to the Fairness Doctrine or an updated version of it; put more power in the hands on non-industry-captured community groups to monitor, administer, and answer for content they allow to pass.

This is not to say that any of this will happen, only to say we had it that way once and could do it again. But billionaires have to be struck off the rolls of leadership first, disconnected from power along with their proxies, and I don’t know if that’s even possible right now.