considers

Trump polls better among low-education voters, but I don’t think that as interesting as it might seem. That is, I don’t think that an effective counter is “just teach everyone enough about everything to identify holes in what’s being said”. Even if it were possible to bring everyone up to speed on a broad range of policy areas – and it just isn’t – you could always just find less-egregious, more-subtle false statements, adapt to a different audience.

Like, I know a few things pretty darn well, would have expert knowledge on them. There are a lot of areas that I know a little bit about, maybe enough to pick up on things that are false, but I can’t go a lot deeper. And there are areas that I just know nothing about.

If I had to give an off-the-cuff guess as to what a counter would be, I’m pretty sure that whatever has to happen has to involve some level of delegating evaluating statements to people in an area who do have expert knowledge and getting a reasonably-objective take from them. Gotta make sure that someone can’t insert their own experts or the like to get through a statement that they want. And that’s not an easy problem.

I mean, people have taken stabs at it. I’ve seen some sort of fact-checking thing that Google News has in the sidebar, and I’ve seen various media sources aiming to do fact-checking. But I don’t think that, as things stand in July 2024, it’s sufficiently effective, if major-party candidates can just regularly make outright outrageously wrong claims and have them go through.