I notice barriers to information search, acquisition, and distribution here and there, often artificially built ones, and it seems that one has to spend considerable time and effort to circumvent those, or even to find that they are there. What follows is an outline of those, and musings about the things one can do to contribute to getting rid of them.
An old and well-known barrier. Speaking more than one language, with at least one widely used language, is helpful to bypass that. As is suggesting others to do the same, helping them to practice, practicing together.
Commercial companies are motivated to advertise themselves, often distorting the truth. Non-commercial ones do as well, but those seem to be more concerned with reputation, less with financial profits, so try to play nicely. This includes things like Microsoft dominating personal computing with Windows as an operating system, especially in certain regions, as well as establishing a near-monopoly on web browsing (Internet Explorer), on development tools (Visual Studio and their languages), office suite, and everything around with their certifications and infrastructures; producing plenty of specialists only familiar with their systems, but to the limited extent Microsoft lets them to learn those proprietary and closed-source systems. It is a little different in 2025, though did not go away completely.
Political propaganda is also prominent, often deceptive, and successfully building distored pictures of the state of the world in people's minds.
Scammers similarly fill everything they can with misleading information.
The involved actors are featured in my note on information security basics, and information security practice is indeed a way to resist those, as is general education.
This is straightforward restriction of communication, often accompanying propaganda, banning certain ideas (with mass surveillance and repressions helping to ensure that people are afraid to share). I kept notes on local censorship, but then had to self-censor those, since after 2022 it seems dangerous to keep those up. Internet censorship in particular comes with much of collateral damage: they dislike a political video, and YouTube is blacklisted; they dislike a Wikipedia article or a GitHub repository, and Wikipedia or GitHub is blacklisted; they dislike a CDN-using website, and everything behind that CDN is being blocked.
My note on distributed systems is largely about the kinds of systems that complicate censorship, but as argued in the note itself, technologies may only do so much: for it to work better, more people should care and support freedom of expression, as well as privacy, and other commonly recognized human rights. While living in systems that they can affect, which seems even more difficult.
Putting extra effort into studying and collecting the censored information is another way to resist the censorship. Just as generally counteracting whatever you find undesirable, while you cannot stop that. Similarly to avoiding products of companies that employ deceptive marketing (e.g., shrinkflation) or other tactics you would rather not have around.
With information, just as with finances and travel, plenty of what is not blocked by local governments yet, is blocked on the other ends instead, mostly using geo-blocking. More so in some places than in others though. Geo-blocking is what I run into regularly, but anything else based on prejudice is likely to work that way.
Supposedly education is one of the ways to combat that, or at least some of it. Unsure how well it works. When you are discriminated against one way or another, it is usually done in such a way that there is no way to appeal: in a simple geo-blocking example, likely there will be no contact information available, and even if there was, it would not seem likely to have any effect to write a message explaining that you are not attacking the website, but merely wanted to retrieve a page. But probably more general discussion and education, which alters the views, norms, morals, and ethics practiced in the society, works better.
The Internet, and the Web in particular, is filled with documents optimized for attention grabbing and advertisement pushing, or at best for looking good on a presentation, rather than efficient information delivery to people with different setups, in different environments, and with different abilities.
I have composed a web design checklist with references to other accessibility guidelines, but those are technical methods, while the problem is rather in the common carelessness and the incentives.
Contacting maintainers of software or websites with inaccessible UIs might be useful, as with any other issues. Apparently people are more reluctant to fix the issues they do not experience, but generally there are higher chances of a fix if multiple people complain about them, while unreported issues may stay indefinitely.
Particularly annoying ones are those for scientific publications. Sci-Hub and other "pirate" resources try to combat that, as do open access resources. Similarly to open textbooks, other works under free and.open licenses, various non-profit projects, and when it comes to software, it is adjacent to the free software movement. Supporting those (whether with donations, with contributions, or simply by raising awareness about them) over publishers of paywalled materials is a straightforward way to fix it.
This is about access to digital technology: one can easily be cut off a multitude of services if they do not own a phone, or even simply if they refuse to install proprietary software on their devices. Avoiding certain services (particularly centralized systems, such as certain IMs) can be problematic when everyone in a group (say, an apartment building) communicates there.
While few people create such a divide while understanding what they are doing, anyone can resist it by asking for fallback options, not hurrying to adopt and use the divisive systems.
Those can lead to self-deception (being mistaken) even without any intention by external actors, and certainly help when there is such an intention. As can misunderstandings in general. Being aware of those, being careful and reflective, may help to mitigate their effects. This is also related to the aforementioned information security practices.
Isolation created in groups or built with technologies, possibly unintentionally. Though one may similarly self-isolate by staying in the comfort zone too much: say, using certain technologies all the time, not searching for and trying others, not being open-minded (about tools or ideas). Putting extra effort into being open-minded should help against that.
Likely there are more; I planned for a short list, but then started recalling more and more ways in which access to information is limited: by different entities, for different reasons, with different methods. Possibly there are better collections of those somewhere around sociology or psychology, of which I am mostly ignorant.
The metaphor with barriers is rather simplified: perhaps a better fitting one would be that with labyrinths, especially where deception is involved, as sometimes people do not simply fail to retrieve correct information, but retrieve false information instead. That is done with the advertisements, scams, political propaganda, as well as conspiracy theories, astrology and other supernatural beliefs; those latter ones actually may appeal to people trying to get past such impediments.
Web search is like that: so far we have failed to produce large and usable structured knowledge databases, such as those with the Semantic Web, let alone widely used formal human languages, but settled on search engines instead. Which are filled with SEO spam, blacklisted or geo-blocking websites, inaccessible websites, and almost everything else listed above, to the point where it seems more reliable, easier, and much faster to generate some plausible-looking bits of information with an LLM than to find them.
Resisting this is basically resisting the chaos and entropy increase, which will win eventually, but we still try to do that as intelligent beings (while creating even more of it in the process as living ones).