You're missing that plenty of people lack the intelligence, education, media literacy etc to actually recognize that "fake"ness. You can still pull in a hundred grand scamming people on instagram by posting a selfie with a rented or parked Lambo and a caption reading "Send me <shitty cryptotoken of the day> and I'll double it and show you how to be rich just like me!!!"

There are people on this very forum who are 100% subscribed to the "if you work hard you will make it" propaganda and also the often unspoken corollary of "if you didn't make it, it's your own fault". Arguably that's the entire ethos of this VC/startup focused community.

We are extremely irrational creatures, who have pretty much only advanced by being able to write down information and curate that body of work over the centuries, enough to tease out a couple semi-working systems that produce better than a coin flip results enough of the time to manage to advance. Even the best educated, smartest, or most successful of us are absolutely chock full of irrationality and bias opposed to direct evidence. Even Einstein abandoned the data when it disagreed with his beliefs.

There's also some preliminary data that younger people consider the awkward, scammy, low production value feel of things like tiktoks to be "more authentic" and therefore more trustworthy to them. All you have to do is say ten words very confidently and some insular community will adopt it as part of their belief system. Look at all the absolute dreck, nonsense pseudoscience that makes up the incel community.

Media literacy is completely irrelevant to all the people who lack it. When you haven't learned HOW to pick apart and interrogate a source of information, you have no option but to fall back to shittier, brand or ideology based source analysis.