But after a few years or so of constant nonsense, you become adapted to the addiction and just ignore everything on it. Atleast thats what happened to me.
I went from constantly checking twitter to deleting my account and just going to the feed of one or two people once a day to keep informed.
I now laugh at how worked up everyone gets, and all the play acting and rival factions involved. Its almost like an iq test, where you pass if you dont play the game.
The problem is a lot of people are staying indoors right now with nothing to do and are discovering twitter/reddit for the first time.
Imagine a person not only new to social media, but new to the internet as a whole with no bs filters built in. He/she would be such a mark.
The real herd immunity is people understanding over time how emotionally manipulative social media is and learning to ignore it like we do 99% of advertisements.
They are so awful. It feels like they were built from the ground up to discourage thoughtful conversation and to just create outrage. On all of these (and with youtube comments as I recently realized, although they have a placebo downvote) there is no way to downvote trolls (or bad/misinformed/useless opinions) and there is no real moderation. The only way to deal with it is to create your own angry response and then it shows up on peoples feeds as so-and-so vs so-and-so... pick your side. It is terrible.
Like in the article, one of the people tweets "stop retweeting #dcblackout" which promotes it further. These platforms feel like they are designed to profit off of humanities worst impulses and I wish there was something I could do to stop them.
It does require a critical eye, which the majority of people don't have, but I'm not sure what the best way to solve that problem is. Moderation at that scale doesn't seem feasible, and a downvote system to silence people, as you suggested, would be easily abused.