Why are people less likely to believe hoaxes today then they were in the past

Because people now had acquired more experience in that type of fraud. Also nowadays there are more unrestrictive access to information that it was in the past so the hoaxes these days must improve to cause the same effect.

Explanation:

Hoaxes are fake news deliberately fabricated to masquerade as the truth.

People are less likely to believe in hoaxes today because of all the free information one can acquire. In the past, information isn't easily found because experiments were seldom believed and information isn't easily acquired because internet or any communications capable of delivering information throughout the world wasn't still available.