If this were the Cold War, America would be poised to lose

Back then, it took two years for “the CIA created AIDS” to spread; nowadays, conspiracy theories can be passed along by networks of bots and trolls in seconds. But even then, the nature of propaganda had to be defined, explained and framed before it could be countered. Someone in power had to decide, in other words, that disinformation was a problem and had to hire people to think about the solution.

Eventually, they did — and not just in the United States. In the 1940s, the British government created a covert research group, the Information Research Department, that put together material on the realities of Soviet life and quietly passed it on to politicians and journalists across Europe. In the 1980s, the U.S. government set up the Active Measures Working Group, a small interagency team that kept track of constantly changing Soviet narratives and came up with responses. Eventually the United States would threaten the U.S.S.R. with sanctions unless it stopped pushing the “CIA created AIDS” mythology. There were ups and downs, successes and failures. But in the end Soviet propaganda failed to win hearts and minds, in part because the United States and its allies pushed back.