I think the key to any potential solution is tackling media centralisation and that includes technology platforms and user data ownership.

I think we understand enough about human behaviour and specifically group-think, thanks to the internet, that it's safe to say that group-think dominates everything.

And that group-think can produce positive outcomes e.g. game dev team producing an awesome game (any kind of situation where group dynamics reinforce certain ideas whilst diminishing others is group-think).

And group-think can produce negative outcomes e.g. believing that house prices only go up, so you build a pyramid of financial assets on top, and later realise, once the pyramid is massive, that they also come down (I'm referring to the financial crisis in case its not clear).

The best argument against media centralisation is that it imposes minority group(s) group-think on the wider population and that could lead to disasters and has done throughout history.

All civilisations so far have had minority group(s) group-think imposed on the wider population. Firstly there were holy books, churches and pulpits. Post industrial revolution it was newspaper barons and politicians. It keeps evolving and we now have a small handful of legacy groups sucking in user data, trying to figure out how to look like they're grass roots activity.

An good aim would be to attenuate legacy media whilst filtering bottom up sources according to verifiability, repetition etc. but most importantly group interconnectedness i.e. radius of group-think.

Putting better authentication at the heart of the internet would be necessary. No more troll farms or [insert-bad-guy] bots. And nothing fuzzing up viewing group interconnectedness.

And we'd need a universal data interchange format/method. So it becomes possible to move your user data from one platform to another in way that only you control your user data. You would let a specific platform control your user data for a while but you can always take back control later.

In order to implement a better authentication method for the internet you'd need the government to enforce usage of certain websites over others (no other way around it to get at the group-think goodness).

So we need a two tier internet. One internet for anybody that doesn't care that huge amounts of the web is filtered out. And one for anyone that does care or just needs to use domains in web development or similar.

You'd have a licensing system for websites and users. To run a website you'd need a license and then you may get audited and you'd be forced under law to use the better authentication method.

To access the web you'd need an authentication account where you show ID in person at an office. And you could apply for an additional license to access the unfiltered web as long as you keep an encrypted activity record.

User data could be stored using different encryption keys for reading and writing. You'd keep keys for reading and writing. And the government keeps keys for reading that also requires your key for reading (your data can be opened by the government in court with you present).

Right, that was a bit of a stream of consciousness. Better stop writing now.