"Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in belief or behavior that are bad, by some standard. Otherwise, why care what people read and watch?"

This is the most interesting point in the article. Why should we care? People believe all kinds of crazy stuff, and still do good things nearly all the time.

Strange beliefs rarely cause violence... certainly not often enough to worry about it. Sept 11 was probably the worst case of that, and we worried way too much.

Maybe day to day there are more minor things that add up, but there's not a lot of evidence that these minor things are any worse than before. As far as I can tell gay marriage is very widely accepted pretty much everywhere in the country. The SCOTUS decision declaring sexual orientation as protected under the Civil Rights Act was written by ... a Trump appointee.

So it really comes down to voting. That's what everyone is worried about: if you believe the "wrong" things you'll vote for the "wrong" person. It's all political.

And that makes the war on disinformation seem a lot less noble, and a lot more prone to abuse. After all, everyone already knows who the "right" candidate is, so disinformation is anything that might get the other one elected. That makes the algorithm easy.