I feel like the threat of misinformation wouldn't be as significant if trust in institutions wasn't so abysmally low right now.

Everyone needs trusted sources to make sense of the world, and if politicians and traditional media sources have repeatedly demonstrated that they aren't very trustworthy, it makes sense that people will start looking elsewhere for their information. On top of that, advertising is pretty much just half truths and lies by omission at this point anyways.

Of course it is a lot easier to simply deflect this responsibility onto social media, but do we really want to be empowering these mega corporations to be arbiters of truth? Social media by design isn't really capable of moderating the inflows of content responsibly as it is.