Social media and crowdsourcing allows for everyone to become an information source. However society is not ready for this. People are used to believe everything they see on the TV, and now they adopted the same attitude for the web.
Some sort of subjective reputation should be introduced and information should be labeled properly: who, when, what, where. Than conflicting reports of the same event by different people could surface easier, or the same information could be backed by different perspectives. And the information consumer would see how credible his friends find the source.
The simple friend-chain leaves out the quality of the relationship: are they friends because he want's to sleep with her or because he appreciates the financial advice she gives to him? Huge difference when one knowing him want's to weight information posted by her.