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Not to sound cliche but I believe the bigger problem in this country is education, which apparently has failed many in this country on both sides of the political spectrum, if the past couple of years are any indication. I guarantee you fix people's problems with English, Math, and History in the classroom, you will have no need for machines or algorithms to filter junk that influences people online.

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Russia and China absolutely kick our butts in all these education categories, yet each in its own way is halfway down the road to a being a benighted, ignorant post-modern totalitarian state. Making us better at reading graphs and interpreting data about climate change is a nice goal, but the great strength of the United States is being an open, liberal republic with institutions (like the press) that people trust, not an illiberal democracy as Russia and others are trying to promote with their cunning use of the Internet and social media. That is exactly what is under attack. We need to make some tools that build our muscles to discover, consume and evaluate views that are different than ours, not just map reduce all the news articles.

Exactly what I was thinking today. Our laziness to read (longer articles, books, etc) and think has caused this problem. Educate the people and this will go away on its own.

This is not something you can make people do through education though. Even among people i know that are highly educated and have achieved top marks and went to the best companies, there are those who just don't give a shot about politics. They are not interested enough to look or dig further.

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