Why are we so gullible?

[plimsoll]

17. While the actions may be PSYOPS, the reasons are largely financial.

We live in a society that has been educated to conflate skeptical with cynical. So the negative connotations of associated with cynicism get attached to any endeavor to ascertain the truth of a statement or proposition. Humans are story tellers and our brains seem hard wired to listen to stories, a good narrative sticks in our heads and can override a reasoned evaluation of facts and probability. We've known about confirmation bias for a couple thousand years, we've just used other words to describe the phenomenon.

If you combine those 3 elements together you have a recipe for disaster, we believe what we already believe, we can be mislead by a good story, and questioning the good story will invoke social pressure not to question it. It's not that we're gullible, we've created a system designed to mislead people. Historically we may have done that for relatively benign purposes, selling more laundry detergent for example. It was simply a matter of time till one faction figured out how to use those factors to manipulate enough of the population to wreak havoc.