Prior to the Internet, all communication included substantially larger amounts of friction. Broadcasting your opinion required acquiring TV, Radio, or Newspaper time/space. Sure there were low cost alternatives like standing in the public square and shouting your beliefs, but that is a far cry from tweeting out something hateful from the comfort of your couch while you eat pizza and watch unlimited streaming video content.
The friction was both a drag on productivity AND a safety mechanism to prevent mass spread of inaccurate or low quality content. I feel like the Internet removed all of that friction which is great in many cases, but particularly bad for accuracy of information. It's like the gossip that used to spread through towns by word of mouth, can now become truth within days just by going viral. And once enough people hear the same thing, isn't it now true?
Perception is reality. Just look to the divisions in the world. Each side when talking amongst themselves has one truth while the opposing side has a completely different one. Doesn't matter which truth is accurate when both sides are unified in their belief that it is their side's story that is correct.
Friction is necessary, to at least slow the contagion of inaccurate information. Right now the incentives are misaligned. Viral content that makes the consumer feel good provides the most economic return for companies like Google and Facebook. While the system is setup to reward this, how could you expect a profit seeking business to do anything else but optimize for it?
I don't think this is correct. I remember a bunch of outlets from the seventies and eighties which had all of: far reach, inaccurate and low quality content. It was just restricted to few influential people with enough money. I think this is the reason why social media are fought that hard: these people lose their influence (not that I am fond of social media). The past was not that rose as we like to paint it.
In general, the reduction in communication friction is THE big advance brought about by the Internet. Instant, effortless, and basically free communication for everyone everywhere.
Businesses like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are economically incentivized to push as hard as possible to get you to consume and create more so that they can show more ads. That means that when a video catches the attention of 50 people long enough to show an ad, then they can quickly encourage the spread of that video very rapidly to maximize that attention grabbing clip.
Nowhere in that equation is there an evaluation of the benefit/harm of that content to the end user. The evaluation is solely on whether it grabs attention. Because the product now being sold is human attention and its being bought by advertisers. The humans being influenced have no say and don't actually reap any gains from the transaction.
Car wrecks are attention grabbing and slow down traffic even the other side of the highway as people gawk. But of course they are not great for anyone....UNLESS you somehow have a business model that makes more money when there are more car wrecks. What happens then?
Just recently the Spiegel (a somewhat reputable weekly journal in Germany) had a series of completely or partial made up stories. The maker was able to place them because they fit so well into Spiegel's narrative. Such that (almost) nobody asked questions.
We are lied to from all sides.
I learned from those days that you had to be careful as what you read on a forum was highly likely (at least in some circles where expertise is limited, the topic is complicated, and questions are plentiful) to be plain nonsense, or pseudo science.
On the other hand though, the increase in friction arguably reduces the scale of the problem you cite - making it financially based is far from ideal, but it at least reduced the breadth of the problem space to some extent.
Absent the centralised media of old, broadcast simply wasn't an option in the past - at best you could try to multicast by shouting in the corner of a bar at as many friends as you could muster, or stand in the street and talk to groups of people.
Unicast was scalable and easily accessible - just pick up the phone, or write a letter. But the average person probably couldn't gain access to a significant multicast group without first gaining the "backing" of their group. And they could then attempt to grow from there. Clearly that's far from perfect as echo chambers are an issue today as well! But it does feel to me like the lack of friction, coupled with nearly instant access to a global, un-namespaced platform, and the ability to broadcast, has just removed a little too much friction. I guess the big challenge is working out how to add enough appropriate friction to improve the situation. Or do we need to revert to a more namespaced internet again?
To an extent I think the big digital platforms already do this, just in a non transparent way, to try to curate the most engaging and click-worthy content, rather than the most thought provoking.
As a thought experiment, what if the degrees of separation were less rigidly enforced, but people's "power of voice" decays the further it goes from those who directly follow them, resulting in a similar result? Then for every user, there's a probability they'll see or not see a given post (significantly reducing as the degree of separation increases). Clearly this isn't ideal and there's compounding factors (if you have 3 friends share it, should that probability be additive?)
Share rate limits in WhatsApp led to people imploring others to copy paste fake news to share it to others, so clearly this isn't as simple as limiting normal shares.