Freedom of thought means dissent. Dissent means there are others who you want to convince that your point of view is more correct. You can do this through honest means or you can do it through misinformation, which currently is a lot cheaper. Think about the amount of money we have to spend to convince people COVID is real vs how much YouTube pundits spend to convince people otherwise.

So the only real solution will be economic: make lies expensive. But by definition lies are easier to manufacture than the truth. Opinions are cheaper than research. And passion tends to be more believable than things people have to read and math they have to check for themselves. You could make the cost social: spread lies, get permanently labeled as a liar and never be able to show your face anywhere again. Can work ok for public figures but less so for /u/QAnon123. You can do it through law: spread lies and go to prison (fines are only punishment for those that don’t have a lot of money). Or you could do it with cruel and unusual punishment so much so that it makes it so taboo that enforcement happens like four times a century. But in either case you will have some death and suffering because someone will be collateral damage.

Yes. This is a big part of the problem: lying is almost free and spreading the truth is relatively costly. As the old adage has it "by the time the truth has put on its boots a lie will be halfway around the world". There is another analogy too: destruction is much cheaper than construction.

The offsetting factor with destruction is that you rarely want to just destroy something. Destruction for the sake of itself is really kind of rare on a large scale. Usually we do it so we can build something different where the old thing was: a new government, a new building, a new way of thinking, whatever. And at that point it’s often times easier to avoid total destruction and instead just do more precise application of force. A revolution is destruction in a way but there is a reason why revolutionists always try to take over existing government structures (physical and ideological): it is cheaper to declare yourself president or king or whatever than to create a nation from scratch.

If we look at it that way, you can’t keep lying forever, right? At some point you either become North Korea or the USSR and try to hide behind the iron curtain, which is nearly impossible in today’s interconnected world, or you have to base your ideology on some version of the truth. Peddlers of misinformation can’t win in the long term.the question is how much damage can they do in the meantime?