I think it’s a bit more hopeful than that(America is still fucked short term, but humanity might be better off long term). Throughout history, people have been misinformed idiots that don’t think critically. It’s just that prior to about 2008, people didn’t really have access to the deluge of information that is social media and we’re still trying to figure that out.

The reason misinformation on social media works so well is that people want to learn things, and if someone tells them a believable enough lie, they’ll take that as fact doing only minimal checks(eg: my friend whom I trust shared this article saying that it’s the Mexican’s fault I see so many homeless people, so it must be true).

Stuff like this has happened throughout history. People published absolutely insane things in books and presented them as fact for hundreds of years, and it set back things like science and medicine for equivalently long, as people didn’t fact check things then either.

The fact that people are already hammering on about trying to fact check social media means that people are educated enough now to start, and we as a species just need another small push in that direction