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I was around then and remember the promises of equalizing knowledge and removing conspiracies and falsehoods from public discourse because of the internet. If everyone had access to instantly fact check a wild claim, then false wild claims would disappear.

We were indeed laughably naive.

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I do think that for good faith arguments the Internet has been very successful in removing unintentional falsehoods -- there's a lot less of the "Eskimos have 100 words for snow" nonsense than there used to be because people can easily check that that's a myth rather than just repeating something they once heard. But obviously things are different when people are trying to promote a falsehood even (or even especially) one they know to be false.

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