WASHINGTON — Since the American presidential election, RT and Sputnik, Russia’s state-funded foreign media networks, have dominated the discussion about the United States’ response to Russian disinformation. This month, the American government debated whether those outlets should be categorized as foreign agents; a recent article in The New York Times Magazine labeled RT “the most effective propaganda operation of the 21st century so far.”

Many Americans seem increasingly to embrace the belief that snuffing out these networks and otherwise responding directly to Russian fakes will win the information war. It won’t. To win this fight, Americans need to think seriously about why RT, Sputnik and “fake news” resonate with so many people in the first place.

RT and Sputnik are bellwethers for the progressing American policy response to disinformation. On Sept. 14, Molly McKew, a writer and consultant who describes herself as an “information warfare expert,” testified before Congress that these “media outlets” and others “deep within the shadow space” have infected America. In response, Ms. McKew would have us “develop a rapid response capability for irregular information warfare” to “secure our information space.” She also recommended more regulation for social media.

Unfortunately, these views are shared by many people who work in the burgeoning anti-fake-news field. They discuss responding directly to Russia by restricting speech, flagging false information on public platforms and opening centers to counter disinformation. The creation of a Western media antidote to RT is floated regularly, even though the channel has only about eight million viewers in the United States each week. (While it has more viewers on YouTube, they are largely brought in by memes or disaster videos, not news.)