If there is a desire for Democracy to maintain control over its population then I would tend to agree, the problem is not with widespread knowledge and information, the problem is with widespread misinformation masqueraded as knowledge...
In other words, fake news? My thesis in this thread is that the importance of fake news is overblown, and all that people need to vote in wildly different patterns in this age is access to information, good or bad.
I'd like to add to this...If people cannot digest information properly that information can become poison to them, causing self-harm or harm to others...When a population cannot properly digest information, it can also destabilize most forms of government and is perhaps one of the reasons the governments of the world do not wish to disclose information they potentially have on alien visitors to this planet...Perhaps they think it may destabilize our society to provide that knowledge to the general public, people may not digest that knowledge properly and think the worst...or worse...
It is a point that many are not able to think critically about information they come across, whether it is fake news or real news. Education has not improved along with technology. I read a story a little while ago which said that researchers had found that people with a postgraduate education were more likely to share fake news stories than those who did not have one.
In the wake of the European referendum in this country, many remainers were left with the conceit that there were lies told by the leave campaign in contrast to the remain side, and that this was what caused people to vote to leave. However, there was utter nonsense spewed by both sides.
Whenever I heard this claim, however, they were only able to point to a single example, that of 'Boris' Johnson, and his promised £350 million a week saved from not having to contribute to the EU budget, which he suggested could go to our social healthcare service. He even had a bus plastered in this as a slogan. This came from an exaggeration of how much Britain actually does contribute to the EU budget (not to mention that the EU would go on to demand that we give a contribution as the cost of leaving).
Although it is true that Johnson lied about this, it is also the case that the lie did not spread very far at all before all major news media were pointing out that it was not true. I did not hear of it except to hear it being debunked. I do not believe that many people at all heard it completely unfiltered. The remoaners do not provide an example of someone who had heard this claim by Johnson and did not hear of the refutation, or chose to ignore the refutation, until after their leave vote had been cast, and cast for this reason.
I doubt a single person was influenced to change their vote to 'Leave' because of what Johnson did, and I would expect that more than a few changed their vote to 'Remain' because of it. Many Leave campaigners were furious that Johnson had done this, and viewed it as potentially campaign-wrecking. But many remainers persist in the delusion that this was some sort of important turning point which caused the vote to go to leave. Mostly because they want to believe it, and not because the facts support it, just like people voted leave because they wanted to vote leave, not because sinister forces were telling them (it is however likely that recruiting the many international authority figures to tell Britons to vote remain--like Barack Obama and Christine Lagarde--was a huge own goal for remainers, inspiring many to vote leave).