Glossary Psychological Warfare and Influence

All technical terms of the article The History of Psychological Warfare and Political Influence with AI in alphabetical order. The number at the end names the section in which the term is introduced; “I” stands for the introduction.

A

• Active measures – The KGB’s collective term (aktivnye meropriyatiya) for covert influence abroad: forged documents, planted articles, paid journalists, front organisations and rumours; run by Department D (1959), later Service A, and the Stasi’s HVA X. 3
• AI agent – Program of language model and tools that carries out multi-step tasks step by step without guidance; since 2025 such agents have run accounts in influence operations and decided whom to talk to. 8
• AI swarms – Groups of AI agents with persistent identities and memory that act in coordination towards a goal and adapt; according to a contribution in Science (January 2026) dangerous above all through synthetic consensus. 8
• Astroturfing – Faking a movement from below where an organisation steers from above, named after a brand of artificial turf; for instance the Fifty Cent Party, which according to King, Pan and Roberts (2017) publishes about 448 million fabricated posts a year. 4

B

• Big Five model – Division of personality into five big traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism; basis of the studies by Kosinski and colleagues (2013, 2015), according to which a program with 300 likes judges personality better than the spouse. 5
• Black propaganda – Propaganda that pretends a false sender, for instance a voice from the opponent’s camp; Delmer’s stations Gustav Siegfried Eins (1941) and Soldatensender Calais (1943), today Doppelganger’s forged newspapers. 2
• Breakout Scale – Ben Nimmo’s scale (2020) that rates an influence operation by its reach in six categories, from one community on one platform (1) to a policy response or call to violence (6); the yardstick of the reports of platforms and AI companies. 6

C

• Computational propaganda – According to Woolley and Howard (2018), the use of algorithms, automation and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social networks; documented in 81 countries in 2021. 5
• Coordinated inauthentic behaviour – Several accounts working together to deceive about their identity or purpose; used by Facebook since July 2018 as grounds for deletion, regardless of the content of the posts. 6

D

• Data voids – Topics on which there are few reliable texts, so that any source that writes something about them is found by search engines and chatbots; according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (2025) one explanation for chatbots citing Russian state sources. 8
• Deepfake – Image, video or audio recording generated or altered with machine learning that has a real person say or do something they never said or did; named after a Reddit user (December 2017); subject to labelling in the EU since 2 August 2026. 6
• Digital watermark – Pattern invisible to the eye that a generator embeds in its images so that they can be recognised as artificial; a University of Maryland study showed in 2023 that it can be removed and stamped onto real images. 8
• Disinformation – Deliberate spreading of false or misleading information in order to deceive a public; in the Soviet intelligence service (dezinformatsiya) a craft of its own, best-known example the AIDS lie INFEKTION (1983–1987). 3

E

• Enemy propaganda – Propaganda meant not to keep one’s own people in line but to wear down the opponent’s; in the First World War run by Crewe House under Northcliffe with millions of leaflets by balloon. 1

F

• Firehose of falsehood – Description of Russian propaganda by Paul and Matthews (RAND, 2016): high volume over many channels, rapid and repetitive, without commitment to reality or consistency; the aim is confusion, not persuasion. 5

G

• Grey propaganda – Propaganda that names no sender but does not pretend a false one either; in the Cold War for instance the stations covertly paid by the CIA, on the net sites such as the Pravda network. 2

I

• Illusory truth effect – Finding of Hasher, Goldstein and Toppino (1977): repeated statements are judged more likely to be true, whether they are or not; the basis of every campaign that makes a lie appear in many places. 3
• Influence operation – Covert attempt to steer the opinions of an audience in which the principal deceives about his identity or purpose; includes sock puppets, troll factories, black propaganda and coordinated inauthentic behaviour. 7
• Information operations – According to the US military doctrine of 1998, actions taken to affect adversary information and information systems while defending one’s own; they include psychological operations, deception and attacks on networks. 4
• Inoculation against persuasion – Protecting attitudes by first showing people weakened counter-arguments together with their refutation; demonstrated by McGuire in 1961, the basis of prebunking. 6

L

• Language model – Program that has learned from large amounts of text to write the most probable continuation of a beginning, and thus produces texts that sound as if written by people; GPT-2 (2019) was at first held back for fear of misuse. 6
• Liar’s dividend – According to Chesney and Citron (2018), the advantage liars gain from the fact that recordings can be faked: they can dismiss genuine recordings as fakes. 6
• LLM grooming – Targeted feeding of the sources from which language models learn and quote, so that they reproduce a narrative; term of the American Sunlight Project (2025) for the Pravda network with over 3.6 million articles a year. 8

M

• Microtargeting – Addressing a message not to everyone but to small groups or individuals whose characteristics are known from data; in campaigns for instance by Obama in 2012 and Cambridge Analytica in 2016. 5

P

• Political influence – Attempt by a state, a party or a company to steer opinions, elections and decisions in another country or its own without those steered seeing the one who steers; the craft of psychological warfare without war. I
• Prebunking – Preventing deception by explaining its method before it arrives; the game Bad News (2018) and the YouTube videos (2022), used by Google Jigsaw in Central Europe and Germany. 6
• Propaganda – According to Lasswell (1927), the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols, by stories, rumours, reports and pictures; since the First World War the task of dedicated agencies. 1
• Psychological targeting – Microtargeting by estimated personality instead of place of residence or age; in a field experiment by Matz and Kosinski (2017) with up to 40 per cent more clicks and 50 per cent more purchases. 5
• Psychological warfare – According to Linebarger (1948), the use of propaganda against an enemy, supplemented by military, economic or political measures as the propaganda requires; since December 2025 the American force for it has again been called PSYOP. I

S

• Sleeper effect – Hovland’s finding (1949): a message from a distrusted source has little effect at first and more after weeks, because one remembers the content and forgets its origin. 2
• Social bot – Account on a social network that is run by a program instead of a person and passes itself off as a person; in the 2016 US campaign, according to Bessi and Ferrara, the source of about 19 per cent of tweets. 5
• Sock puppet – Invented person on the net behind whom someone else is hiding, an account with name, photo and story; in 2011 US Central Command ordered software with which one operator was to run up to ten such personas. 4

T

• Troll factory – Organisation in which employed writers run sock puppets at piece rates, compose posts and stoke quarrels, with daily quotas and performance checks; the model is the Internet Research Agency in Saint Petersburg (2013). 5
• Two-step flow – Finding of Lazarsfeld and colleagues (1944): media first reach opinion leaders, who pass on what they have heard to others; the reason why influence operations try to win people who pass things on. 2

W

• White propaganda – Propaganda that names its true sender, such as the German broadcasts of the BBC and of the Voice of America (1942) or today campaign advertising under one’s own name. 2