For almost all of human history, sharing and persisting information had a pretty high cost. To get something into someone else's head, first you had to verbally tell them. Then you could at least write it once and have it read multiple times. That written work persisted over time longer too, though it required scribes to manually copy them periodically to broadcast it farther.
During all of that time, driving the cost to persist and broadcast information down has been a good thing. The cheaper the better, because it gives more brains access to useful information. I think because of that, we assumed the ideal cost is zero.
In the past several years, I believe we are slowly, painfully, realizing that we were wrong. The web has driven that cost down to practically zero. Any rando can write anything and it will be served on the web to all and sundry in perpetuity.
The problem with that is that it makes it equally easy to broadcast mis-information. What humans need to prosper is access to good information — true facts and useful ideas. Information that helps us take actions that help people.
When there's a non-zero maintainance cost for info, someone has to periodically choose to pay that cost. The scribe has to decide what book to copy. The printer has to decide which pamphlets to re-print. The public access channel has to decide which shows to schedule.
If someone can't be motivated to care about some piece of information enough to do that, it naturally decays and disappears. Like evolution, there's a natural selection process where some memes die. Now, granted, even with a non-zero cost, bad or misinformed actors may choose to further bad information. But I think that happens way more often when the cost to doing so is nil.
So, when you have a non-zero cost, it encourages a certain amount of selection where useful information tends to last longer. At the same time, you don't want the cost too high. When that happens, only the powerful are able to decide what information persists and they choose only information that furthers their own power. Driving the cost down has been, I think, one of the major engines of democracy.
But I do think we've overshot the mark now. In the next several years, it's going to be up to us as a culture to figure out how to effectively deal with the hurricane of misinformation constantly roaring around us. It is, I think, the biggest threat facing human society today.
(You might argue that climate change is a bigger threat. But note that a primary reason we're failing to take sufficient action on climate change is because of misinformation.)