“The freedom of press makes its influence felt not only upon political opinions but also on all men’s opinions. It modifies customs as well as laws.”

—Alexis de Tocqueville

In October 2019, select U.S. officials offered closed-door congressional testimony regarding their knowledge of events surrounding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Dr. Fiona Hill, a former adviser on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council, testified it was very likely Russian disinformation influenced the documents used to acquire a surveillance warrant on members of then-candidate Trump’s campaign. A January 2018 Wall Street Journal editorial by the Central Intelligence Agency’s former Moscow station chief, Daniel Hoffman, appears to support her assessment.

If even partially true, this is a significant development. It would force the national security enterprise to amend its understanding of disinformation’s potential to shape the national consciousness—a conversation that until recently has been defined by references to social media bots and Internet trolls.

Reporting on disinformation generally focuses on either violent extremists or hostile states deploying carefully crafted lies to influence portions of the civilian population by distorting their perception of the truth. But this was not always the case. In fact, this emphasis on public opinion is a rather nascent phenomenon. How did we get to this point, why is disinformation so prevalent, and what should the world expect from it going forward? The following analysis explores these increasingly important questions, and concludes that the skyrocketing volume, reach, and subtlety of disinformation from both states and non-state actors will make it harder to combat at the policy level in the future.

Disinformation: A Short History

In its simplest form, disinformation is lies spread consciously with an explicit—often political—objective. Not to be confused with misinformation, disinformation is purposeful, usually deriving from the source of the lie, whereas the misled carriers of that lie become the unknowing propagators of misinformation. In other words, misinformation can be the product of a successful disinformation campaign.

The practice has had its place in every civilization, but its fundamental purpose of achieving political change limited its use throughout antiquity and into the dynastic age when autocratic figures controlled the distribution of information. Even prominent campaigns of the early 17th century, such as those waged by Habsburg supporters during the Thirty Years’ War, were examples of localized attempts to consolidate domestic power by controlling one’s own information environment. Such intrastate politics are a far cry from interstate campaigns designed to erode the legitimacy of distant ruling parties by altering public perception. Targeted lies were not often intended for the general population of foreign powers for two reasons.

First, the ability for such information to travel rapidly through large swaths of citizenry was severely limited. Second, even if the disinformation gained traction, an autocracy possessed the means to smash murmurs of insurrection rather decisively. Instead, early disinformation campaigns usually sought to deceive specific officials or misdirect the general intelligence estimates of governments. Athenian general Themistocles used disinformation to fool King Xerxes of Persia into a hasty withdrawal across the Hellespont in the fifth century BCE with devastating results. In the following century, King Philip II of Macedon was notorious for employing spies who fed the Athenian council false information regarding Philip’s true designs on Athens.

The infamous Boston Massacre of 1770 demonstrated the opportunistic nature of localized propaganda in the wake of major events. Paul Revere’s sensationalized—and likely plagiarized— engraving of the massacre, though influential, still failed to convince a plurality of colonists to take up arms against the British crown at the time. Even if it had, this would be another Habsburgian example of localized, internal disinformation. Sometime later, during the Great Game period of 18th and 19th century in Central Asia, spies and commercial espionage agents littered the continent. Numerous empires sought to map Asia and feed their imperial archives—to use a term coined by Harvard University professor Thomas Richards. They became both the distributors and recipients of disinformation as competing colonial powers such as Tsarist Russia and Napoleonic France each vied for influence in the unforgiving reaches of Afghanistan, India, and elsewhere.

Still, throughout this period the most effective disinformation remained aimed at the state and its associated functionaries where it could garner the greatest return on investment. It was not until the crumbling of empires after the Great War that the proponents of disinformation began to witness a shifting base of power. Throughout the 20th century, decolonization and democratization placed imperial power into the hands of the people, thus redirecting the focus of groups bent on coerced political transformation from the governors to the governed.