Nuking platforms isn’t the answer, the real answer is to educate the populace to recognize such phenomenon and train them to not be misled. Otherwise new outrage machines will just be created.
Who does the educating and who decides what that education should be? No doubt the most extreme across the spectrums will eagerly volunteer to do both while insisting that they're the moderate center.
Well, for example, schools? We already teach children history, basic statistics, media literacy, basic epistemology, etc.
That does not mean that schools teach kids what to think. Rather, we teach kids how to think, and what the common pitfalls are.
The problem is that this means that a bad education leaves you vulnerable to manipulation. That, and the fact that it takes 10-20 years for the effect to reach society.
I like the idea, but people seem very resistant to things like being de-programmed from Qanon and the like. A lot of the anti-intellectualism that underpins vaccine refusal is grounded in a deep mistrust of authority. It will be quite difficult to achieve without stomping on a lot of sources of misinformation, which in this age is like playing whack-a-mole in a 10,000 acre field.
However, deplatforming seems to work. Nuking the platforms doesn't seem too extreme to me given the harm they are causing.
"deep mistrust of authority" won't likely go away if people see "stomping on a lot of sources of misinformation" every day.
This isn't a new situation. People spread hoaxes, but also true and unwanted info, in the wars when governments tried to suppress unfavorable news from the fronts. Mistrust / distrust cannot really be remedied by massive shows of force.
How else is it supposed to be managed? When a mere 12 sources of disinformation can generate a wide panic, we have a massive problem that needs a sledgehammer to fix.
Taking sledgehammer on human communication does not seem efficient and side-effect-less to me.
I grew up in late Communist Czechoslovakia. The party cracked down on unwanted information really hard. They had a 13,000 strong secret police with extensive powers to do that, and forty years of experience how to strangle dissent. Kids were schooled in the One and Only Correct Way of Thinking, up to and including university, where you had to clear several classes of Marxism-Leninism before being allowed to, say, build bridges. Things like Xerox machines were tightly controlled and subject to registration, to curtail spread of illegal leaflets.
And yet rumors spreaded within days of anything happening and distrust against the government and whatever the government said to the public was absolutely rampant.
If anything, at the end of the day they sledgehammered themselves.
