I would prefer people were taught critical thinking skills with a focus on identifying and dismissing propaganda for what it is. I suspect the main reason we don’t is so much of the propaganda is home grown and considered essential to maintaining a compliant population. Corporatism hasn’t yet figured out how to maintain a population that’s receptive to marketing and resistant to foreign propaganda. For now there seems to be a focus on provenance and restricting of speech for non-approved concepts.
I don’t think people are smart enough generally. There’s a huge amount of money to be made spreading fake news. Just like you shouldn’t represent yourself in court, the professionals will always find ways to beat the hobbyists.
> I don’t think people are smart enough generally.
This is the problem with the world today. We have decided that the average person is so dangerously stupid that we need to have governments protect us from 'average people'.
People aren't smart enough and/or don't have enough time and/or are too susceptible to emotional or psychological manipulation to be capable of sorting out truth and fiction, let alone correct conclusions from incorrect conclusions supported by misleading truths. The scale and effectiveness of misinformation makes it completely untenable.
Even if it were effective, we've been encouraging the "teaching [of] critical thinking" for all the time I've been alive and pretty much nothing has changed (at least, not in the direction of increased critical thinking!). At this point, a call to teach critical thinking is a call of no action.
