I'm not actually convinced that the Internet has changed things that much. If anything, it makes it easier to find reliable sources to refute this stuff.
Back before the Internet became mainstream this stuff was always about. Every pub had a fella in there who looked like Neil from the Young Ones who would bang on about JFK or the Queen being a lizard or whatever. You could never really challenge it then because you wouldn't have the facts at your fingertips like you do now.
I remember in the early days of the Internet stumbling across snopes.com and it was a real eye opener just browsing around and finding out how much stuff you assumed to be true was just made up nonsense. Mainly harmless stuff about celebrities etc. but there were plenty of real conspiracy theories that you just kind of accepted if someone told you.
What has changed I think is that mainstream politicians have been able to use the Internet and social media to weaponise this kind of stuff. It allows all of the pub bores across the world to find each other and organise, and people like Trump have found ways to direct them without ever publicly endorsing them. Before they were just weird fellas hanging around the fruit machine but now they are an actual force.
The problem in my view is how "mainstream" the internet has become. 15 or 20 years ago (when there was already loads of shite around like fake moonlanding or whatever) the internet was still a thing that people used for work like for writing e-mails or they were checking regular news sites from established media outlets who adhere to journalistic standards. There was still no real widespread use of the internet. Yes, you had people in message boards and you had all kinds of stuff floating around, but it was far from main stream. It was for people who had an interest in it and who actually made an effort to find what they were looking for (and they had to have something they were looking for, i.e. you needed people actively searching for an LFC-community for example to communicate with other reds).
All that has changed with social media and with smartphones. Nowadays, nearly everyone (at least in our part of the world) has a possibility to access the internet. My mum is 66 years old and she has never used a computer before other than for work in a very limited capacity. She now has a smartphone and even though she has no idea how to do the more complicated stuff like using facebook or other social media, she still reads those google news things she came across one time by accident. There are many more people like that around and a lot who dive a lot deeper into it by being on social media. The problem for me is, that too many people seem to have forgotten how to filter information or that they don't realise that every village idiot know has the possibility to share their crazy ideas on social media and via other means like youtube, etc. Social media like Facebook and the internet in general has too much credibility with a lot of people. "I've read it on Facebook/the internet, so it has to be true". It's how media used to work. If you read something in the newspaper or saw something on TV you could (and still very much can) believe that what you've read or seen is true (or at least as true as it can be going by journalistic standards, i.e. it has been fact checked).
People applied the same standards to the internet and social media, without realising that that's absolutely not the case. While you can find a shitload of very useful and great information, there's an equal amount of shite out there. And people have to learn to filter that out, just like they knew 30 years ago, that you let the idiot in your village talk about his crazy ideas, but you're not taking him seriously. The internet is basically a free for all for all the village idiots. The issue has been excacerbated by social media, where there's almost no quality control for information and where you can get caught in bubbles that reinforce your crazy viewpoints to the point where all the "good" information doesn't reach you or you just don't care about it, because you're getting all those links in your timeline to people who are saying that the Queen was a lizard or whatever. In a best case scenario, you get the same amount of links saying that the Queen isn't a lizard, but it would still suggest those viewpoints are basically 50-50 and it's up to you to decide which one to believe.
So, for me the issue is with the spread of the internet and all those possibilities that have come with it (like social media, publishing possibilities like youtube or setting up your own "news" website/blog). That's where it started. Since that has happened, of course a lot of bad actors (be that politicians, companies, interest groups, con-people, whatever) have seen the possibilities that has created for them and they're making full use of it. However, without the whole development technology has made in recent years/decades they couldn't have done so.
The scary thing for me is, that I don't see a possibility to reverse that development. The cat's out of the bag and there's no way to get it back inside, because the bag has about a million holes.
