The goal of much disinfo is exactly this, to remove the idea of objective reality, facts, or truth. It is common and useful to do this in authoritarian regimes. It goes along with depoliticization where the population comes to believe that they have no control and should desire no control over politics or government.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

Also there’s less accountability at the same time that the costs have never been lower. A lot of free speech assumptions are based on relative ratios and implicit social pressure to discourage abuse. There just aren’t that many people who are going to stand around screaming insults or lies in a public space, and there’s no equivalent for one guy pretending to be hundreds of people or, especially, for 10 people in a different country to pretend to be part of an entire political movement on another continent.

So are we banning bots or what the bots are saying? One guy can say the same thing and that is what appears to be targeted.

Probably both and neither - for example, rather than outright banning things requiring them to be linked to a verified owner would potentially allow some speech without the negatives. A historic comparison might be the way Americans making political donations are required to affirm that they are using their own money without reimbursement to add a legal risk to paying people to flood public debate.

I don’t claim to have the answers, but was just pointing out that the world has changed and we will need different policies.

Media has always been filled with lies and propaganda. That isn't new. The folk traveling from out of town brought slanted news and biased stories to the watering hole. Songs manipulate your feelings on various topics. Broadsheets brought you the vile things the bad guys are doing, whether accurate or not. The newspapers, radio, and tv media have been filled with propaganda since their inceptions. I'm not sure that anything has changed except there is now another medium people need to learn to filter through. It's coming at us from more directions at once, but we have to open the door for those voices to come in.

So, since it was always in principle possible that the streets of every city, town, and village could be flooded by millions of newsies, all hocking editions of a variety of newspapers that had all just began publishing that day, we should do nothing now that it is actually possible in practice?

I'm not saying I know what the solution actually is, but denying that there even is a problem, or that the existing guidelines were designed with the above scenario in mind, is just preposterous to me.

I don't deny there is a problem. I am saying the problem is as old as time.

Again, think of scale and cost. Newspapers needed to be written, printed, and required a distribution network – all of which require money, time, and infrastructure. That doesn’t mean that they were perfect but they developed reputations and because they needed to pay those bills there was some moderating influence for not scaring off readers or advertisers — that’s not perfect but it’s why you had stories which only ran in tabloids because the owners of the bigger papers didn’t want to lose business or get sued (physical presence means assets at risk!) by someone they slandered. Governments often had rules about foreign ownership of media outlets, registration or permitting requirements for journalists, etc.

Again, I’m not saying that everything was perfect before but that the rules and norms from the past need to be adjusted for the present. The way we handled hundreds of television stations can’t scale to millions of websites or social media accounts, especially since you no longer have anchors like geographic proximity or business identities.

The idea of automated bot armies manipulating public discourse is largely a fantasy. The claims about such bots (usually on Twitter) never hold up to close inspection. Go do your own research (the thing that anti-free speech people often hate the most) and you'll discover many of the accounts labelled as bots by media and academia are humans.