You make a good point. All online posts are equal, and that's a terrible thing because on popular sites a shouty bad actor looks just as credible as a real expert - especially if the former relies on dogwhistle rhetoric, deliberate confusion, and superficial point-scoring, and the latter is trying to respond with facts and reason.

Good moderation can keep out bad actors and promote an adult and civil tone, but it's insanely time-consuming and expensive.

There really needs to be a new legal concept - something like poisoning of free speech. It's one thing to have unpopular and unusual opinions and to argue them, but another to set out to knowingly and deliberately subvert and poison communities with calibrated lies and aggression.

There is no upside to the latter, and the face-to-face equivalent would usually have consequences. Free speech advocates online seem to believe that online communities are somehow magically strong enough to handle these threats automatically - but in reality they can be more fragile than face to face communities. Some formal appreciation of that might not be a bad thing.