I feel like authenticity of online communication is an unsolved problem. The web was supposed to be a democratizing platform: all you need to communicate with the world is an ISP and a keyboard. But if there's no way to control for authenticity, online sentiment will just be an arms race for who can pay for the best astroturfing.
Yes, and if you are somewhat tech savvy OR "grew up" on the internet (say 40 and younger) you understand this. The problem is previous generations who don't really understand this. Perhaps one angle to tackle the problem is to educate the group(s) of people who continue to believe whatever they read on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
There is a book called Because Internet. It's about linguistic change on the internet. It starts out by dividing internet into different periods and defining meaningful cohorts of users. The later part makes for a much more meaningful separation than old vs young. In fact younger users are often less techy than older cohorts since at some point you had to be technically fluent to even get on the internet.