The type of people who understand and will use (collaboratively or otherwise) the tools available to proactively filter what information reaches them are going to generally fall into two categories:

• people who are not particularly susceptible to misinformation
• people already captured by misinformation (who will use such tools to help avoid cognitive dissonance, usually with block lists curated by their thought leaders)

I think the misinformation problem is, at it’s root, a shortage of trust in institutions (fueled partly by actual failures, but more by deliberate attacks). As such, there is no systemic solution that people who most need it won’t go to great lengths to circumvent. But combatting misinformation is a numbers game, and the largest number of vulnerable citizens are low-information voters who are not particularly radicalized but simply react to whatever reaches them with far too little skepticism.

For them, I think some simple, low level and easily circumvented internet filtering would do a world of good. Like just have our ISPs serve up DNS redirects to government-hosted pages proclaiming the site is blocked and detailing why, with links to things like private, non-partisan analysis as supporting evidence. Circumventing this is trivial, but the initial hurdle is good enough to redirect a sizeable amount of low-information, unmotivated users somewhere more productive or at least better moderated. It’s also weak enough to minimize the inevitable complaints about censorship.

I don’t like censorship myself, but I’m past believing we can maintain national security with none at all. People who are reasonably well-informed are finding their collective future just as threatened as the low-information voters inviting foreign influence through the back door.