> The only way democracy can work is if voters are making decisions based on real world information.

Let’s review the history of the oldest democracy on the planet. And then the history of the second, the third, etc. Who gets to decide what information is real? CDC? WHO? NYT? Fox? Who’s the final authority if not each of us? Your statement implies incredibly low expectations for the people and inflated expectations for “authorities”. It is ultimately an _authoritarian_ view, quite the opposite of democracy.

I'm not sure there's a sufficient difference between those things to make the point you're trying to make stick. There's a non-trivial amount of people in this country (and on this website, it seems) who think Trump is, literally not metaphorically, an agent of the Kremlin. Are those people a threat to democracy? I certainly don't think so. I think they're idiots, but I don't think they're literally threatening democracy.

>Injecting completely false information into the public discourse is a direct attack on democracy.

The line you are drawing here is very very close to accusing people who share false information of treason. Are we sure we want to walk up to that line? I'm not. I think it's frankly pretty silly. It's also interesting that you assume there is some neutral arbiter that can decide what is "real" and what is "true" and what is "fact" (all different things, btw).

>The only way democracy can work is if voters are making decisions based on real world information.

It's also interesting that you think this was ever the state of democracy, and not the status quo.