At some point personal responsibility has to come into play, right? I certainly don't want everything curated for me by someone else before it hits my senses.
this cultural shift in attitude toward the Web was probably inevitable and we probably won't ever go back to the way things were before, which is unfortunate, but here we are.
And even in the very earliest days there was both resistance and propaganda online. One of the earliest books I have addressing this is John S. Waterman's The Matrix, published in 1990, about the then-extant "conferencing systems" worldwide. Its forward mentions what was a then-breaking develoopment: the 4 June 1989 Tienanmen Square protests and massacre, and the consequent flood of messages via fax and telephone by the student protesters.
What happened over the course of the aughts and teens is that the Internet achieved mass global reach. The Facebook, YouTube, and Whatsap logos are probably the most-widely reproduced symbols on the planet, each having 2 billion or more active users. Mobile internet means that this contact is continuous throughout the day and limited to highly-emotive content.
And now the misinformation and disinformation is mainstream. State-level actors --- Russia and China, yes, but also India, Israel, the US, and others --- are engaged in propaganda of various forms. Commercial interests do so through advertising and influencers. Politics are now online not merely in California and the US, but globally. The bottleneck isn't the network, it's the public's ability to perceive and sort through the bullshit and manipulation, much of which is exceedingly adept.
Media changes societies. It always has, going back to speech. And the changes we're living through now will have profound and long-lived consequences.