> The acceleration is in the decrease of the cost to produce misinformation.

So it's a spam issue. And normally, while annoying it's possible to fight spam, however on these topics we have built structures that disable the very mechanisms allowing us to fight spam. That's worrying.

The fact that someone can instruct their computer to astroturf their flight tracking app on some forum for nerds is irrelevant - people have been instructing "marketing agencies" to astroturf their brand of caffeinated sugar water on tv, radio and press for decades and centuries. For a very long time the "traditional media" was aware that their ability to sell astroturfing capacity was hanging on their general trustworthiness. Then the internets rose to prominence, traditional media followed by selling more and more of their capacity to astroturfers. Now we have a worrying situation that the internets might be spammed by astroturfers a bit too much, but the backup is broken already. Now that's truly frightening.

Welcome to the post-truth world, where objective references outside of your own village cannot exist.