How did memes, misinformation, fake news and cyber bullying propagate before Facebook and other forms of social media? I know it happened but I don't remember it being such a high-profile issue.
For starters the internet is less balkanized, social media platforms are magnitudes larger than the largest forums ever were so an idea can just spread faster and further than before. Email chains could approximate the reach but other factors meant they were less potent and also I think people had fewer emails known in their address books than they generally have friends on social media though I don't have any numbers to back up that gut feeling. Although things are just randomly shared outside of social nets by social media algorithms so that would also help it jump outside of limited social groups too.
Next the medium is just inherently more engaging now that photo and video are first class citizens on the major platforms, they're way more attention grabbing and engaging than a wall of text could hope to be.
Also I think fundamentally there's an imbalance between how easy it is to lie and to debunk a lie and how much each of those will spread. A lie is exciting/angering and people will spread it much faster than the 800 word debunk that explains just how full of crap the lie was (and often how the person spreading it is using it as a trojan horse for other shittier ideas). "Everything you know about X is wrong" spreads faster than "No most of what you knew was basically right and here's the history of X," it's shocking and new vs familiar and old.
Finally I think there's a fair amount of blame on the structure of *feeds and the algorithms that place things on them. It optimizes for salacious, shocking content that gets people to share it because that's what the algorithm selects for (roughly), things that keep users on the site so more ad impressions can be served. Add to that bad actors willing to lie and twist the truth to make money and a decade or so of Darwinian corporate evolution and you've got a pretty nasty combo.
This is the bottom line.
Back in the day you'd join a forum over a particular topic or hobby. Everyone had screen names. Moderation was tight, if there was politics it was confined to a single area that was easily avoided. You only saw "links" to "topics" that included images, not images.
Now with social media, people share images, memes, quotes, posts, etc. But while before that could be confined to one particular area and wasn't visible with fully anonymous screen names, now you see a real person that you know saying it, in your feed. It makes it feel more real. And get this - 50 people liked it and shared it themselves.
Where Facebook's brilliance comes in - is that it gamed the process of popularity. Most want to have as many "friends" as possible at first, they see old people they knew and want to see what they're up to, want to be popular, etc. But they don't realize that they really just don't want to get to know that many people that well. Some people are insane, some are borderline white supremacists, some are borderline anarchists. Before you never saw that side of people often. Now it's right in your face.
My advice? use social media for what it was originally designed for - staying in touch with friends you actually care about. Not politics. And mute/remove any friend who cares more about their agenda than seeing a good friend's cool vacation or neat artwork or cute newborn.
It's probably an extension of advertising, behaviour modification and outright propaganda (including agit-prop). Previously newspapers, magazines and televisions were used. Would Facebook etc be giving rise to a new phenomena or is it an existing one in new clothes?
Hoaxes are a good subject to look at, like the dead alien hoax. How did a hoax spread before the Internet?
Assuming new things are spreading, how can we make a vaccine to protect people against hoaxes and fake news but not against advertising, manipulation, behaviour modification and necessary government propaganda?
Lots of old quotes about falsehood spreading faster than truth: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
Excuse me for sounding daft, but I think the intensity with which you are confronted with these opinions has changed drastically. I think you're purposefully being a bit ignorant here; no one (viz: 'they') wants to cancel opinions they disagree with. However to think that false information has the same platform today that it had 50 years ago is also just plain wrong-- and whether you agree with it or not, it does shape the public discourse these days. Unless you want to erode discussions to a point where its a battle of who can fabricate the biggest claim (true or not), you're going to have to accept that in a modern information society we will eventually need some form of controls.
Case in point: https://twitter.com/0x445442 (Seems you have a problem with "Leftists" and like to retweet right wing tweets)
Back in the day, the internet just laughed at "stupid people". Now it tries to ruin their lives for daring to say something edgy.
"Information controls" is one of the most horrific concepts I've ever heard of.
"Information Controls" -- I see you are making some kind of boogey man of this, but this already exists in some forms already (Slander/Libel/etc). I don't know how anyone can seriously argue that anyone should be able to claim whatever they want with no repercussions (especially when that anyone holds a position of power -- you could easily fabricate a story with false pretences to justify further power grabs).
Didn't some guy literally get canceled because he posted a study that discussed the effectiveness of violent vs peaceful protests?
random search: https://twitter.com/jenbrea/status/1271148784316108800?lang=...
Check out all the censorship laws in the past and even present. Content ratings, censorship committees present even today in many countries, including democratic ones.
Just for fun, check out how many pictures of Roosevelt showing him as a cripple you can find ;-)