It used to be that great-power deception meant tricking leaders and leaving the rest of us out of it. D-Day victory hinged on convincing Hitler and his top military commanders that the allies would invade France at Pas-de-Calais, not Normandy. British intelligence staged an elaborate deception operation, turning nearly all of Germany’s spies into unwitting double agents and feeding them false information about invasion plans. The allies even invented a fictitious army called the First United States Army Group, led by Lieutenant General George Patton. This phantom force had dummy landing craft, fake oil storage depots, airfields, vehicle tracks and more—all to deceive any possible German observers or aerial reconnaissance. The deception worked so well, Hitler delayed sending reinforcements to Normandy even after the allies landed there because he was convinced it was a diversion, and that the real invasion would still be at Pas-de-Calais. As Winston Churchill famously remarked, the truth had to be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.

Cold War deception was also an elite affair. The Cuban missile crisis was the ultimate spy-on-spy moment. The Soviets went to great lengths to hide their plans for deploying nuclear missiles from everyone, even the Soviet ship crews carrying them. Captains were told only to head to coordinates in the Atlantic Ocean where they would unseal an envelope in the presence of a KGB officer. Inside was a note with the actual destination in Cuba. And just to make sure nobody else on board knew, the last sentence of the note read, “After familiarizing yourself with the contents of this document, destroy it.”

Meanwhile Khrushchev and his foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, were busy reassuring President Kennedy that the Soviet military buildup in Cuba—which was obvious and heavily reported by U.S. intelligence agencies—was purely defensive in nature. They lied. And Kennedy believed them. Had American U-2 spy planes not flown over the Western part of Cuba when they did—at the insistence of CIA Director John McCone, who was convinced the Soviets couldn’t be trusted—Khrushchev’s surprise would have worked.

Today, deception is often not designed to trick a handful of leaders. It’s designed to trick us all. Deception has gone viral, thanks to global platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google. These neutral platforms aren’t looking so neutral anymore. Russia showed just how easy it is to influence what millions of Americans see, who they like, who they hate, and what they do about it. We are moving to a world where the tip of the spear isn’t a soldier or a spy, but everyday citizens on their smart phones. Russia is playing the role of virtual Mephistopheles, encouraging our worst instincts, one tweet and Facebook friend at a time. Russia may be the first to embrace massive online geopolitical deception, but it is unlikely to be the only one.