Mastodawn

@RickiTarr

Busy, inattentive, lazy would cover some of them.
There is an intelligience component, whether IQ, EQ or a mix.
You can score highly and still be taken in, especially if brainwashed by various cults.
Equally you can score low, but be empirically driven, so hard to fool.

Stupid is usually shorthand for unthinking, which can be due to fear, if you lack control and fear loss of income or whatever, perhaps worse, it is easier to stay silent.
Thusly the current nightmares come into being.

Disinformation is done best when either hiding a small truth in a bundle of lies or the reverse - the trick is to know which and when.

However, with mass media, fluff stories, imagined outrages and plain old bullshit are the chaff which hide what we need to know.

Too easy to distract people by overwhelming them.

Like the UK Budget.
On the day you get what the government thinks we want to hear.
In the weeks which follow, the truth which is hardly palatable.

Kite Flying - standard practice for politics.

Seriously though, Confirmation Bias is part of human nature, hard to overcome.
With age comes realism (usually dismissed as cynicism).

The Trolls are getting quite sophisticated and that changes things.

Ultimately it takes a certain (bloody minded) mindset TO notice and resist.

Hard to decide between the conspiracy explanation and the more likely one of how COULD you keep it secret, most people are only too happy to boast they know something you don't.
Especially politicians who are verbally incontinent on a good day.