Is digital literacy the problem? Believing that a prominent politician ran a prostitution ring is a basic reasoning problem. I think we'll have to wait until they die off.
The problem in this particular case isn't old people. If you want to point at one broad demographic, it's men, largely under the age of 50.
I remember there was a trump meme going around where he supposedly said "if I ever ran for president it would be as a republican, they are all a bunch of morons". The first time I saw that it looked sketchy as hell, but both of my folks (intelligent people, mind you) bought it hook, line, and sinker. In general, it's younger people that I saw citing it as a fake while older people shared it. Totally anecdotal, I'll grant you, but I hardly think my experience is unique
It would seem like fake news at first glance surely. It's downright bizarre.
I certainly would have written it off as 'National Enquirer' were it not out of super credible institutions.
Sometimes it's hard to tell what is 'truth' and the major 'credible' news agencies simply don't cover a lot of things.
Indeed. And there's a huge war over creditability. It's expensive to maintain and it suits some people to destroy it entirely.
The problem is that accusations of pedophilia and molestation are emotional warheads so we get nutcases trying to shoot up pizzerias because of a rumor that makes absolutely zero sense because it is physically impossible. There's a reason we have gag orders in high profile trials and why we sometimes sequester juries: every time the public gets involved in such an emotional issue, justice is at risk of getting perverted.
People like Epstein must be brought to justice and everyone who covered for them like Dershowitz and Acosta must feel the full force of the law and society they betrayed, but we have to do so deliberately. Otherwise, they'll just get away and continue to hurt people while qanon and Breitbart continue to radicalize a vulnerable segment of the population using easily disprovable lies.
More realistically though, the pizzeria was a codeword for the real location. Plenty of evidence for pizza-related codewords is in the Podesta emails. It's really creepy. Normal people don't rent specific numbers of slices of pizza for specific numbers of hours. It is widely thought that the number of slices is actually the age of the victim. Pizza-related codewords are known to be used by criminals involved in that sort of thing; some have been caught. Podesta also has some disturbing artwork in his home that features children.
"Male French or Italian politician involved in sexual misconduct" is well within the range of plausible news; the whole pizzagate thing relied on all sorts of alleged implausible details.
Then there's the UK's "Dolphin Square" controversy, which largely went silent after Lord Ashcroft started threatening people with libel lawsuits and in any case is now buried under Brexit news. I've filed that firmly in the "Don't Know, and maybe impossible to know" category. The public inquiry rumbles on and will no doubt not report until all the accused are safely dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Inquiry_into_Child...
My point is it's a mess out there, and most people don't have insight into how the world really works, so I usually don't go blaming retirees for passing along false information of the Tabloid kind. It is what it is.
Facebook is not new, it's just now we have digitized banal gossip. I guess the difference now is we can measure it.