Absolutely. Especially since tabloid like self confirming facile nonsense has broader user retention and thus profitability than difficult or subtle factual information.
>What is naive is to solve this problem by putting the determination of truth and falsehood in the hands of a centralized authority.
Indeed that would be catastrophic. But the ordering of the facebook timeline is intentionally emphasizing self confirming propagandistic nonsense: We already live in a highly propagandized facebook steam. Just remove that (highly profitable) bias from the algorithm.
>Disagreements on basic facts are not new.
Now however it is far worse, indeed essentially nonexistent. As a result the width of the division has grown enormously in the last 10 years. In the, US for example, the vast majority of counties are now either landslide red or landslide blue. The most polarized since the civil war. And there has never been this level of overt hostility to science at the top of the political ladder.
On the larger scale, it is a mistake to think that the experiment of enlightenment democracy that is only present in a minority of countries and in those, only for a fraction of history, is somehow permanent and can somehow endure when the public no longer has access to accurate information. Indeed, nascent democracies are already being snuffed out one by one.