Why are there no mechanisms in place to avoid obviously false answers from being upvoted and coming off as legitimate?

Question

Many people get their facts from this site. Many people also do not do properly read and understand the answers they read, but merely mindlessly look at the upvote count and figure it must be true.

Here's an example of an obviously false answer by user @user5341: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/41526

Upvoted 21 times, yet it contains claims that are in no way supported by the provided articles and pictures (which I assume were provided in as confusing of a way as possible to make it harder to check the claim).

Why are there not any mechanisms in place to prevent such false answers, propagandaic even, from coming off as legitimate?

One idea could be to have a "approved" or "verified" marker which only moderators or otherwise high-rep posters can award to a post, if that moderator themselves checked the sources cited and can verify that the claims are indeed correct. This would then be an addition to the usual upvotes.

Then if any random reader sees a post with 50 upvotes but no "approved"-marker, that means that nobody trustworthy has yet to check the claims in the post, and so one should still remain suspicious.

Answer 1

I think it's not an obviously "false" answer. It presents numbers backed by references. While not the best answer in the thread, I don't see why we should intervene beyond voting.

Often, there are going to be multiple, possibly diverging pieces of evidence and interpretations. It's important that we represent them all.

Remember: the point of this site is not "truth", but "evidence". Voting follows the quality of the evidence.

Answer 2

If

Many people also do not do properly read and understand the answers they read, but merely mindlessly look at the upvote count and figure it must be true.

and

One idea could be to have a "approved" or "verified" marker which only moderators or otherwise high-rep posters can award to a post, if that moderator themselves checked the sources cited and can verify that the claims are indeed correct.

then it seems absolutely counterproductive to encourage "not reading properly" by adding an authoritarian "approved" stamp. This would be yet another cognitive shortcut that undermines critical thinking.

How can such a badge improve the problem with reading comprehension?

In my opinion people coming to any site on StackExchange should be aware that it takes quite often a lot of time until "the best content rises to the top". A question being featured on the Hot Network Questions list is thankfully not always heavily distorted in how the answers are voted on. The only thing "obvious" to me in the mentioned thread is that the topic generates a lot of opinions.

Here, we expect to be able to independently check what you are saying — that is a key aspect of being a skeptic — as we want to chase down the evidence, rather than relying on authority or personal expertise. You should expect that people will actually follow up and check your references say what you claim they say.
_{Just the FAQs, ma'am.}

No one should "come here to get her facts". People should come here to get inspiration to think for themselves and might be aided in that endeavour by good evidence presented to them.

Answer 3

If you look at the comments section, you can see lots of heavily upvoted comments criticising the answer. This is an easily visible indication that lots of other users have problems with this answer.

I'd rather have the community as a whole judge the quality of answers rather than moderators or high rep users when possible, and I think they've done an adequate job here.

Low-rep users aren't able to see the vote split: currently it's +64/-36. This may be useful information to display.