To me this is exactly the problem of our times and should not be trivialized. Were there too few gatekeepers of news in the past? Maybe, but the "new" problem is that it has become too efficient (IMO) to spread misinformation while peoples ability and tolerance to spend time on researching the facts has diminished. To say it another way, misinformation/obfuscation/misdirection are not new but the scale of it is and it is critical for us to come up with better solutions to deal with it than we have today. Our climate and our democracies depend on it.

The TV series Rome (set around Julius Caesar's era) shows a guy orating/reading the daily news which was generally propaganda for whomever was in power, in the making of the accompanying the series, a consultant claims this was historically accurate. Several details in the series seem fantastical to modern viewers but have some historical basis.

Yes, and the guy is one of the few characters to survive each regime change. Gaius! (shovels) Julius! (shovels) Caesar!

>Or the retro seo trick where you ask a question on yahoo questions so you can answer it with another account to backlink "relevant" website.

So, Quora?

Sure, it is not a new problem, but we have to solve it again, and perhaps with a different solution given the new medium.

how was it solved in 18th century Paris? was it solved?

I think that culture just sort of "evolves" out of the problem?

> how was it solved in 18th century Paris?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

It was “solved” by the wholesale bloody massacre of those who lived in the upper strata of society and their families. Not the sort of solution you’d want replicated.

Pre-YouTube, fashion companies would employ companies to identify the cool kids in a group and give them free stuff to wear, in order to promote the brand.

Is this not still a thing for Instagram “influencers”?

I guess nowadays you don't need companies to tell you who the cool kid is because you can just look at followers count.

There is even a movie about that "The Joneses"