@evonity@mastodon.social I'll expand a little bit on this point.
I do not use commercial social networks at the moment while I did use Facebook years ago.
Mastodon is the first social network I'm using in 7 years.
I do not use commercial social networks mainly because they're strictly linked to me and I mainly interact with my friends; most of the times I used to get into arguments or just waste time reading useless stuff about them and thus I decided to stop doing that and actually meet my friends or call them on the phone.
I still have that account that I occasionally open since I do receive messages from time to time.
I started using mastodon because I interact with people I don't know and I can actually find some interesting things.
I believe the stuff people writes on mastodon is currently more interesting that what I used to find on facebook.

Personally, I prefer using mastodon.
This doesn't mean that I believe it is a superior system.
I'm now thinking about the social network that most of the people should use.
I prefer the majority of people to be using commercial social networks.
I prefer this, because I have the idea (definitely unproven) that it is easier for them to control the spread of fake news and malicious groups intervervention.
They have failed to prevent it until now, but I still believe they can do it better than mastodon in the future.

I don't think de-masking fake news is a matter of crowd sourcing.
I believe it's impossible to address all fake news and conspiracy theories that are sprawling by analyzing and explaining the mistakes.
Also, you would have to get people to actually read and understand your explanation; which is not so easy.
Moreover there is plenty of people that got convinced about certain theories and won't believe whatever explanation you provide.

I believe the best way to fight fake news is a widespread education, but this is impossible in short times (such as 50 years) specially if you see that plenty of people share fake news in rich and educated countries; this will be even more difficult for poor countries.

Thus I believe it would be good to identify ways to block people from spreading fake news.
This is dangerous, because you're giving someone e.g. Facebook the power to decide what information is good and what instead should be censored.
I believe this should best be done by a government or at least strictly regulated.
Even with the best intentions, the biases of the people operating this censorship will get through, but I still believe this to be better than this spread of fake news.
I don't know how this issue can be solved, perhaps by giving more visibility to newspapers over other sources of information; whatever that is, I believe that large companies have more resources to find a solution and should be compelled by governments to find one.

This won't solve the problem completely, but it might help in reducing it.
For example: facebook was able to identify a Russian influence over the elections in the USA.
They did not prevent it and found it only after the fact; but since they were able to identify it, it could be possible for them to develop systems to prevent these kinds of things in the future.

Regarding AI: it could aid in doing something for sure, but AI itself is not the solution.
You have to be careful about what AI has been trained on and what it is doing.
Moreover, since there is no central authority in mastodon you cannot enforce an AI to do fact checking.

Overall, I believe that Facebook could better protect from fake news a stupid guy who just logs in and believes in everything he reads than mastodon, and this is what I want a popular social network to do.
Mastodon can work well as long as it doesn't become popular.