Yeah. Up until recently, the ability to immediately communicate information to hundreds of thousands of people at once was guarded. Editors economically metered

Yeah. Up until recently, the ability to immediately communicate information to hundreds of thousands of people at once was guarded. Editors economically metered inches of print, networks (the original 4) were ruthlessly inoffensive to avoid pushing people away, radio stations religiously avoided dead air, etc. To build a fringe movement in the past, one could reach up to dozens of people directly or through pamphlets. Using the model of viral spread, the viral load from a pamphlet or from a conspiracy theorist's mouth was too low to infect most people, so the conspiracy would fizzle. If enough susceptible people were blasted with a high enough load of false information, those people could become infected and start spreading the false information themselves, triggering exponential spread, but in the past there weren't good ways to identify susceptible people. Modern platforms, optimizing for engagement/watch time, leveraged the immense amount of data they generate from user behavior to identify clusters of user behavior patterns, predict the cluster a user is most similar to, and feed that user content that activates other users in that cluster. In short, modern platforms make it far easier to both find people susceptible to a false narrative (or ensemble of false narratives), and to spread the false narrative. Humanity has never faced this phenomena until recently, where anyone can infect hundreds of millions of people with false ideas like "the earth is flat", or "a deadly virus, and strategies to prevent it's spread, should be ignored", or "democracy is a lie and it is not a mechanism for peacefully removing people from power". If we don't demand a solution, we're going to continue to see massive death and destruction from uninformed or even perverse response to disease, climate change, and a myriad of other issues.