It’s not that simple though. People who live in rural areas already have resources that they trust, and that’s outside of the Internet, and with their local communities, churches or not. The way we, as humans, look at information is highly dependent on what we already know, with all our biases and know-hows shaped by our past experiences. And as much as people on Lemmy think it’s easy, knowing how to lookup the Internet is a skill: just work with someone who doesn’t use the Internet much, and you’ll see how some amount of investigative skill and patience is needed, and it’s not just a “ask whatever you want into the search bar” kind of deal. Even we don’t just do that: the Internet has a ton of trashy websites that can’t be trusted, and we have to learn how to filter those out.

It’s easy to just say that these people are gullible, but I see their gullibility as something that is shaped by people with malicious intents. Keep the education system badly funded or ran by likeminded people, add that with a community that seems to be doing well without outside knowledge, and you have an environment that’ll churn out people who are likely to believe whatever their circle of people peddles to them, especially if they’ve created an environment where you don’t trust anyone from the out group.