While it’s true that “all elections are won on lies spewed by the parties”, it’s always a matter of context. The media landscape of the past 10 years has both shrunk and inflated at the same time: centralized social media now overwhelmingly represent the main source of information from which people read news and shape their views of the world. The fact that some of those social media have more or less explicitly stated their affiliation to some sort of government which might make their interests offers a worrying scenario: in one case, the state can require the manipulation of information so as to steer the results of election towards governments that might create strategic geopolitical tension or sweetened deals (i.e. China and TikTok). On the other, through the “loaning” of centralized social media to the highest bidder can create enormous echo chambers which corrupt the results only for symbiontic, growing entanglement of social media corporations into forms of government (i.e. Elon Musk in 2024).
Tl;Dr: Social media are a bigger problem than good old politicians’ lies because they can be easily manipulated by external forces and because everyone uses them.
I’m from Italy as well. I always like to remember a quote from Charles Mingus, who at some point in his career had an entire black band with the exception of his sax player, Charlie Mariano. When asked about it, he answered something along of the lines of “He’s not white, he’s Italian.”