add to that the fact that clicks drive everything, and you have a perfect storm of "information" (read: MISinformation) being fed to the masses in the most hysterical possible form, to ensure clicks. self-licking ice cream cone...
again, going to the click bait side of things, what are the incentives for FB, Twitter, IG.... etc to police this shit? When clicks drive everything, it incentivizes these fake accounts to be as outrageous as possible....
the overall saddest part of all of this is the fact that a lot, MAYBE the majority of Americans believe this nonsense and don't verify things. When I went to SERE school 5-6 years ago, I was the student that they decided to do a social media dive on. I thought I was doing a great job of locking down my accounts, but the information they could find on me in the open source realm was shocking. We're talking, they asked me things like "is your government aware that you hired a coyote to mule your illegal wife across the border??" and "you have a trailer that you call your "mobile command center", and you have numerous pictures of your firearms, are you fomenting dissent in your country and do you plan to do so in ours?"... DISTURBING. Privacy is one of the big reasons that I deleted all my social media accounts, but i've seen what happens on them nowadays, and it's really really sad that people are so uneducated that they trust everything they see on social media as "fact"....
ugh.... this pisses me off just to talk about. social media is going to be the downfall of society.