Its pretty wild but I always think back to the past and my reading of history. The masses have always been easily deceived. The root problem is not the tech. Its us. We are not skeptical enough. In the recent past information was completely controlled by a handful of newspapers and radio/TV networks. They lied to the public. The government lied to the public. Those that knew this and wanted to expose it were very limited. Most people had no access to alternative view points. There was little pressure on these elites. At least now we have the ability to research far more information than our ancestors. The problem is the sheer volume of information. So much of it is noise. Misinformation has always been an issue. I don't believe it is worse. It think the elites have less control over. There are more actors now and many of them are only interested in chaos. Its not good but it could be worse. We could be under complete control of an elite psyop machine with no defense against it.

The defense against all this "misinformation" is skepticism and honestly focusing on what is in your control. A larger issue in society is this addiction to the drip of new information. At least 90% of the time when I hear "misinformation" it is from some corporate media type that is angry that someone is contradicting the message they are relaying from their gov/corp overlords.