An eye-opening NYT report on the inherent difficulties, despite the best efforts of the League of Women Voters and other groups:

A critical mass of research now suggests that tools such as fact checks, warning labels, prebunking and media literacy are less effective and expansive than imagined, especially as they move from pristine academic experiments into the messy, fast-changing public sphere….

Interventions like warning labels and digital literacy training improved the ability of participants to judge true or false headlines by only about 5 to 10 percent. Those results are better than nothing, its authors said, but it pales in comparison to the enormous scale of digital misinformation.

“I find it hard to say that these initiatives have had a lot of success,” said Chico Q. Camargo, a senior lecturer in computer science at the University of Exeter who has argued that disinformation research needs reform.

Political experts worry that disinformation peddlers, equipped with increasingly sophisticated schemes, will be able to easily bypass weak defenses to influence election results — an increasingly urgent concern, as voters in countries around the globe head to the polls in hotly contested elections.

For me, the story calls to mind Justice Brandeis’s admonition in Whitney v. California, now almost a century ago: “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” In an age of proliferating political falsehoods, I can’t help but wonder whether “more speech” is really an effective remedy.