The signal to noise ratio is getting worse by the day, unfortunately.

Definitely doesn't help, and modern machine learning models are only going to make this problem worse.

That's kind of the point.

We now have access to the information, and we've discovered that all along it was our inability to distinguish between misinformation and real information that was causing the stupidity.

Another issue is that information is easy enough to find that people don't bother to remember things as much anymore, since they can just look up the majority of stuff on Wikipedia or something if they ever need to know it. It leads to people having a smaller pool of background knowledge, which makes them easier to mislead.

Best case example I know of these days: try to shop for a mattress

Ain't hard. Bullshit has a smell