People have always been stupid and ignorant of what's going on around them. Even supposedly "smart" people are stupid in their own ways. But when ignorance and misinformation are distributed in a mostly random way, facts might have a means of bubbling up out of the noise.

Social media gives the most satisfying types of misinformation a mechanism to spread, grow, streamline themselves to satisfy the largest possible population. It's like it presents a change in the intellectual climate that makes us more susceptible to the spread of retroviral memes.