Not so much Banned Books, as Gish Gallop.

I once saw a blog post criticizing Banned Books Week, on the basis that nowadays, the problem isn't the suppression of ideas so much as the proliferation of absurd ideas faster than they can be discredited. I agree completely, and I wish I could find it again, to link it. However, while awareness of a problem is preferable to ignorance of danger, it doesn't do much good if action isn't taken.

The way to fight misinformation is with properly-researched information, and there are plenty of fact-checking sites out there already, such as Snopes and Politifact. However, we can't force people to do research. While writing this, I thought back to an xkcd strip (http://xkcd.com/810/), which seemed to offer a suggestion, especially with the title text: "And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co-- ... oh." While it might seem tempting to apply this idea to the real world, the thing about a democracy is that we can't just say who can vote and who can't, nor should we want to (http://www.crmvet.org/info/lithome.htm). Those people who would be pushed outside the system wouldn't just disappear, and the worst thing one can do with the ignorant is to remove their sense of belonging to the community.

The reason the xkcd suggestion would work on the Internet is because the 'Net is fractured, an exaggeration of our tendency to self-segregate according to hobbies and interests, without the real-life counteracting need to cross these social boundaries for such basic needs as groceries. What defines a nation is the fact that the majority of its members think of themselves as belonging to one nation, and this is why alienating fellow citizens through disenfranchisement would be self-destructive.

In the early '90s film Pump Up the Volume, Val Kilmer's character was given the line, "The truth is a virus"; well, we've been shown that misinformation is, too, only it's more virulent. How do we stop it?  I dunno. But this is one of the Internet's strong points: hooking people up, and allowing for brainstorming on a scale unthinkable without it.