How on earth do we counteract this? How do we define "legitimate news source" without also limiting the accessibility of the press?
The issue is that everyone teachable learned during the Gulf War that our relationship with the media has changed forever and that unless you see the same take in a few different places, it's bullshit. Everyone who isn't teachable is out of reach anyway. It's been disheartening to watch the world decide that the best approach towards anti-vax parents is to SHOUT SCIENCE AT THEM LOUDER. Because "restoring faith in the medical establishment" is something your average normie has no idea how to approach, we walk around Facebook preaching to the converted and assuming that the people whose basis in life is a fundamental distrust of authority will somehow come around.
I've been using mediabiasfactcheck.com to gauge bias and trustworthiness. It's not perfect, but the concept is pretty solid. Of course, they're begging for money (and I really should donate). I'm not sure how to scale something like that up so that it's capable of more quickly stamping out the constantly morphing disinfo landscape. Snopes is still excellent, imho. When people dispute the validity of Snopes, it's usually an indicator that they're almost completely detached from reality. And it's definitely an older demographic that places much more trust in local news. Anyone privy to the Sinclair News viral video has probably had their faith in local news shaken.
The problem is how to get the average reader of Tennessee Star to do a fact check on their "local newspaper". I think we need to pressure tech companies into taking responsibility. YouTube is experimenting with fact checking in India these days. Facebook and Google Search need to do the same. Maybe even web browsers should show warnings when visiting known misinformation sites. Tech companies got us into this mess, they should be held responsible and help us out of it.
Yeah, browser plug-ins are a great idea, but my grandma's on internet explorer, and I don't even know if she goes anywhere except Facebook, ya know? For the life of me, I can't figure out how to solve the problem of the 65+ demographic.
With how most browsers are engineered, I don't think there's a need for putting it into the workings of a browser. It's a perfect use-case for browser extensions or releasing something similar to Firefox ESR with a bundle of pre-installed and pre-configured extensions (it's essentially the idea behind the TOR Browser, at least its early releases). Plus consider all the outcry resulting from making it opt-out. Libel/slander, "who watches the watchers", accusations of censorship, genuine false-positives, media outlets using the tool against competitors, and who knows what kind of legal implications. Those always follow even in much more benign changes when it comes to content flagging.