Ask HN: Could information warfare make the web and democracy incompatible?

Something worth thinking about. If the Russians/Chinese/other bad actors keep doing influence operations into other countries (and let's say for the sake of argument, they are effective - it's hard to think they wouldn't be, considering they are used by both state actors and private enterprise) is it possible that there is no way to secure the open web agaisnt it? In that case, is the open web a threat to democracy itself?

As in, even if you ban political ads coming from foreign countries, you can't limit "free speech". However if that "free speech" includes a massive botnet that's actually conducting an influencce operation on your population, the only solution might be to isolate your population from foreign actors entirely. Which would mean the end of the Open Web.

Looking into the recent Russian information warfare operations, I wonder whether the only way to insulate from something like this (a massive online effort to pretend to be citizens of another country so as to influence its elections) would be to simply cut them off your internet. This sounds terrible, sure, but then what do you do to safeguard democracy agaisnt this?