Anyone who's read even a moderate amount of literature from history, old news filings, old political pamphlets and just about any amount of private and state propaganda from any era of history, or anyone who's read accounts of the things so many (possibly most) average people and many educated people believed throughout much of history would know how laughable it is to think that misinformation and disinformation (today's boogeymen) are anything new. Sure, AI lets them be grown to new scale, but even this has a saturation point. Proportionally i'd argue that in any case, the problem was no less, and probably worse in some ways even as near back as the recent past. Why? Because open access to honest and diverse information was much more restricted. It isn't so much today, though you need to sift, as anyone has always had to anyhow.

The modern notion in some circles that we should entrust "filtering" and even regulatory controls against this to governments and their helpers in the major tech companies is downright grotesque given the sources of so much of the most lethal misinformation and the outcomes of similar social control throughout history.