Cheap distribution makes manipulation easier, not harder. The time it takes for a bad actor to capture attention is much smaller now. It used to be you'd read one news article about a story once a day in a newspaper and maybe once more in the evening news. In between you could think about it, talk about it with other people you know in real life, etc.

Now you're getting meme after meme of the same story multiple times throughout the day, twisted in so many ways. And since we all have our feeds/algorithms adjusted to suit our own tastes we're all getting our own silo'd view of things and can barely rely on a shared set of facts.

All that makes manipulation of people much easier.

I really didn’t experience the early internet that way.