Mark Zuckerberg has announced that his giant Meta empire will quit fact-checking the stuff posted by people using its various social networking outlets. Anyone can post anything outside a few criminal categories, no matter how ill-informed, ludicrously wrong or downright delusional. The people who used to vet postings to weed out the flagrantly untrue or grossly misleading are being ditched. The laneways of public information will be open and undefended against ignorance or abuse.