The internet has gone from a high-trust society to a low-trust society, all in the span of a couple of decades.
Enshittification strikes again.
And it doesn't have appear to have any means to rid itself of the bad apples. A sad situation all around.
The WWW has never been a high-trust place. Some smaller communities, sure, but anyone has always been able to write basically what they want on the internet, true or false, as long as it is not illegal in the country hosting it, which is close to nothing in the US.
The difference is that there historically weren't much to be gained by annoying or misleading people on the internet, so trolling is mainly motivated by personal satisfaction. Two things changed since then: (1) most people now use the internet as the primary information source, and (2) the cost of creating bullshit has fallen precipitously.
to be boring, the term "enshittification" was invented by one individual, recently, and has a specific meaning. it does not refer to "things just get worse" but describes a specific strategy adopted by corporations using the internet for commercial purposes.
It might be more accurate to say that a lot of low-trust societies have become connected to the Internet which weren't nearly as online a couple of decades ago.
For example, a huge fraction of the world's spam originates from Russia, India and Bangladesh. And we know that a lot of the romance scams are perpetrated by Chinese gangs operating out of quasi-lawless parts of Myanmar. Not so much from, say, Switzerland.