All these are true, but just as it happened before the internet, it's accelerating even further. There are clear costs that cannot just be hand waved away.

I'm not sure we can say it's accelerating. The techniques that adversarial actors use has always been changing and when they shift tactics it can take a while for an adequate defense is adopted. We're still dealing with sql injection in the owasp top ten. What I think would indicate an acceleration is when the most security oriented organizations continuously fail to defend against new attacks. If we start hearing about JPMorgan and Google getting popped every month or two, we're in trouble.

The acceleration is in the decrease of the cost to produce misinformation.

Misinformation in pure text form has always been cheapest, but is even cheaper now that text generation is basically a solved problem. Photos have been more expensive, it used to take time and skill with a photo editor to produce a believable image of an event that never happened. The cost is now very low, it's mostly about prompting skills. Fake videos were considerably harder, especially coupled with speech. Just a few years ago I could assume any video I saw was either real or a time-consuming, deliberate fake.

We've now entered a time where fake videos of famous people take actual effort to tell apart, and can be produced for a low cost - something accessible to an individual, not a big corporation. We can have an entirely fake video of Trump, or another world leader, giving a speech and it will look like the real thing, with the audiovisual "tells" of it being fake getting harder to notice every few months.

> The acceleration is in the decrease of the cost to produce misinformation.

So it's a spam issue. And normally, while annoying it's possible to fight spam, however on these topics we have built structures that disable the very mechanisms allowing us to fight spam. That's worrying.

The fact that someone can instruct their computer to astroturf their flight tracking app on some forum for nerds is irrelevant - people have been instructing "marketing agencies" to astroturf their brand of caffeinated sugar water on tv, radio and press for decades and centuries. For a very long time the "traditional media" was aware that their ability to sell astroturfing capacity was hanging on their general trustworthiness. Then the internets rose to prominence, traditional media followed by selling more and more of their capacity to astroturfers. Now we have a worrying situation that the internets might be spammed by astroturfers a bit too much, but the backup is broken already. Now that's truly frightening.

Welcome to the post-truth world, where objective references outside of your own village cannot exist.

It's an algorithm issue. When people hold a media consumption device in front of their face all day and the algorithms are played, then it's literally a brainwashing device.

It is not an algorithm issue. It would still be a huge problem with zero algorithmic social media.