The History of Psychological Warfare and Political Influence with AI

First version 29 October 2026, last changed 29 October 2026 · Andreas Stockter

Psychological warfare is the attempt to defeat an opponent not through his body but through his mind: soldiers are to surrender instead of fighting, citizens to doubt their government, allies the alliance. The American expert Paul Linebarger, who had practised it himself in the Second World War, described it in 1948 as the use of propaganda against an enemy, together with such military, economic or political measures as may be required to supplement the propaganda.¹ Political influence is the same craft without war: a state, a party or a company tries to steer the opinions, elections and decisions in another country or in its own, in such a way that those steered do not see the one who steers. Both are as old as politics. What is new in every century is only the tool, and this text tells how the leaflet that a balloon carried across the front became a machine that writes by itself, runs accounts by itself and, as experiments from 2025 show, argues more persuasively in conversation than most people.

Like the history of AI, the history of AI in security and defence, the history of the Internet and the history of democratisation, this text follows a chain: each epoch solves a bottleneck the previous one left open and in doing so creates the next. Here the bottleneck has had the same shape since the first leaflet: whoever wants to influence needs reach, and he needs credibility, and the two do not get along. What reaches many is recognised as propaganda; what is credible because it seems to come from the neighbourhood reaches few and needs many hands. First reach was missing, then credibility, then patience, then staff, then language, then effect, finally spread, and with each solution fewer people were needed for more voices (Figure 1). Every technical term is set in bold at the point where it is explained and is used only after that. A glossary lists all the terms alphabetically.

Contents: 1 Leaflets and bureaucracies · 2 Airwaves and colours of the lie · 3 Transmitters, balloons, active measures · 4 Net and sock puppet · 5 Troll factory, bot, profile · 6 Rules, yardsticks, fakes · 7 The machine writes · 8 Persuasion, agents, open question · Chain · Timeline · Further reading · Sources

1. Leaflets and bureaucracies: the First World War (1914–1932)

The problem. The war of 1914 was the first in which whole societies fought. Millions of soldiers had to endure years in trenches, millions of women workers in factories, and the neutral countries, above all the United States, decided with their loans and in the end with their troops who won. No government could order that; it had to campaign for it. The means were old, newspaper, poster, speech, but the scale was new, and for the first time states set up their own agencies for it. Propaganda was what the American political scientist Harold Lasswell called in 1927 what they did there: the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols, by stories, rumours, reports and pictures.²

The agencies. In September 1914 Britain set up a war propaganda bureau in London’s Wellington House under the politician Charles Masterman, so secret that not even Parliament knew of it; it wrote, printed and distributed above all for neutral countries, and its most important audience sat in America.³ When the United States itself entered the war in April 1917, President Wilson created the Committee on Public Information under the journalist George Creel with Executive Order 2594 of 13 April. Its best-known institution was the Four Minute Men: 75,000 volunteer speakers in 5,200 communities who explained the war aims for four minutes in cinemas, churches and clubs, in 755,190 speeches according to the committee’s final report.⁴ The method was that of an advertising agency, and it worked with people from advertising.

The leaflet. The third agency was aimed at the enemy himself. In February 1918 the newspaper owner Lord Northcliffe became Director of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, based at Crewe House in London. Enemy propaganda is not meant to keep one’s own people in line but to wear down the opponent’s: it tells the soldiers that they are losing, that their officers are lying to them, that the prisoners get good food. Its carrier was the leaflet, and because aircraft were too scarce for it, balloons carried it across the front, almost 2,000 a week. According to the figures that Northcliffe’s deputy Campbell Stuart published in 1920, just under 1.7 million leaflets came down over and behind the German lines in June 1918, almost four million in August, 5.4 million in October.⁵ The German high command counted along, because soldiers had to hand the leaflets in: Stuart quotes Hindenburg’s figures of 84,000 leaflets handed in in May, 120,000 in June and 300,000 in July 1918, and Hindenburg himself spoke of ten thousand poisoned arrows daily in July.⁵ The leaflet did not disappear with the later media: in October 2023 the Israeli military dropped leaflets over Gaza City telling residents to flee south immediately, and in July 2024 thousands more.⁶

The legend. What the leaflets really achieved was never measured; that they worked was believed most firmly after the war by the defeated. Erich Ludendorff wrote in his memoirs of 1919 that Germany had been under a moral blockade in the neutral countries and that its own people had been hypnotised by enemy propaganda as a rabbit by a snake.⁷ The explanation fitted the legend of the stab in the back, according to which the army had remained undefeated in the field and had been betrayed by the home front, and Adolf Hitler devoted two chapters of Mein Kampf to propaganda, in which he claimed that good British and bad German propaganda had decided the war. Historians consider this false; German propaganda was in many respects more advanced than British.⁸ But the lesson drawn from it had more consequences than the truth: whoever wanted to win the next war had to fight it in people’s heads as well.

The science. In America the same lesson was drawn, only more soberly. Lasswell wrote his doctoral thesis on Propaganda Technique in the World War, published as a book in 1927, and made propaganda a subject of social science.² Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud who had worked on Creel’s committee, carried the craft over to companies and parties and in 1928 wrote a book with the plain title Propaganda. It begins with the sentence that the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society, and that the people who manipulate this unseen mechanism constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of the country.⁹ In 1947 he called the same thing, in an essay, The Engineering of Consent.⁹ The sentence about the invisible government was meant as praise. To this day it describes exactly what an influence operation wants.

Try it yourself. The sources of this epoch are freely available online. Campbell Stuart’s Secrets of Crewe House of 1920 is at Project Gutenberg (number 77798), with the monthly leaflet figures and illustrations of the texts; so is Bernays’ Propaganda (number 78634), and whoever reads its first two pages reads the programme of every advertising and influence agency since. The final report of the Committee on Public Information is in the Internet Archive. Whoever puts one of the leaflets of 1918 next to a post of a present-day influence operation recognises the same three messages: you are losing, your leaders are lying, on the other side you are better off.

The bottleneck. In 1918 states had agencies for propaganda, scientists who studied it and a means that carried it across the front. But the leaflet had two limits. It reached only where a balloon drifted, and it recognisably came from the enemy; whoever picked it up knew who was speaking to him. What was missing was a carrier that reached everyone without anyone having to pick up a piece of paper, and a voice that did not reveal whom it belonged to.

2. The airwaves and the colours of the lie (1933–1945)

Broadcasting as an instrument of state. The first part of the problem was solved by radio, and no government understood that faster than the National Socialist one. On 13 March 1933, six weeks after the seizure of power, a decree of the Reich President created the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda with Joseph Goebbels as minister.¹⁰ In August of the same year the radio exhibition in Berlin presented the People’s Receiver VE 301, a set for 76 Reichsmarks, while good sets cost 200 to 400; in 1938 the German Small Receiver for 35 marks followed. In 1933 a quarter of German households had a radio, in 1941 almost two thirds.¹¹ Broadcasting reached everyone, in every room, at the same hour, and it belonged to the state. From 1 September 1939 listening to foreign stations was forbidden, and whoever passed on what he had heard risked death in the worst case.¹²

The colours. With that, every power had its station, and every listener knew whom he was listening to. The British solved the second part of the problem by forging the sender. The British and American services distinguished propaganda by its origin in three colours. White propaganda names its true sender, like the German broadcasts of the BBC or of the Voice of America, which was founded on 1 February 1942 and broadcast its first programme in German on 24 February.¹³ Grey propaganda names no sender but does not pretend a false one either; Linebarger described it as material for which no source is indicated, but neither is any attempt made to suggest a false source.¹ Black propaganda pretends to be something it is not: a voice from the opponent’s own camp (Figure 2).

The Chief. The master of the third colour was Sefton Delmer, a journalist who had grown up in Berlin as the son of a British university teacher. On 23 May 1941, two weeks after Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland, a station called Gustav Siegfried Eins went on the air on short wave, supposedly an illegal station in Germany, on which a Prussian officer of the old school, “der Chef”, railed against the selfish party bosses of the lower and middle ranks who were harming the war effort; he was spoken by an émigré from Berlin.¹⁴ The trick was that the station stood on the listener’s side. It was patriotic, it did not attack the leadership but the functionaries, and it destroyed their reputation with details that sounded credible. From 22 March 1943 the short-wave station Atlantik broadcast for the crews of the U-boats, from 14 November 1943 the Soldatensender Calais for the troops in the west, over a 500-kilowatt transmitter called Aspidistra in southern England. Delmer’s rule was that the false station had to offer better news and better entertainment than the real ones, and between the verifiable reports he placed the false ones.¹⁵ The office that ran all this was the Political Warfare Executive, founded in August 1941 and housed under the cover name of a Foreign Office intelligence department at a country house near Woburn.¹⁶

The billions. The Americans brought industry. In February 1944 the Psychological Warfare Division was formed at Allied headquarters under General Robert McClure, using transmitters, loudspeakers and above all leaflets. Eighty per cent of them were dropped by the Eighth Air Force, in a special leaflet bomb that held some 80,000 sheets and burst in the air; artillery shells carried 500 to 1,500.¹⁷ A single squadron, the Night Leaflet Squadron, dropped almost 1.5 billion leaflets on 319 nights.¹⁸ Together there were several billion in the western theatre.

The measurement. At the same time people began to measure what all this achieved. The sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld questioned the same 600 or so voters in Erie County, Ohio, every month for seven months during the presidential campaign of 1940 and found that conversations with acquaintances determined the vote more than radio and newspapers. The media first reached some well-informed people, and they passed on what they had heard. This two-step flow of communication, from the media to the opinion leaders and from them to the others, appeared in 1944 in The People’s Choice and is the reason why every later influence operation has tried not only to send messages but to win people who pass them on.¹⁹ The psychologist Carl Hovland tested in experiments for the War Department what Frank Capra’s film series Why We Fight changed in the minds of recruits, and in doing so found the sleeper effect: a message from a source one distrusts has little effect at first and more after weeks, because one remembers the content and forgets where it came from.²⁰ Both findings are central to black propaganda: what matters is not that the source is credible but that it is forgotten.

Try it yourself. Recordings of the Soldatensender Calais and of Gustav Siegfried Eins can be found in broadcasting archives and on video platforms; whoever listens for ten minutes hears how little propaganda there is in them and understands why it worked. The leaflets of both world wars are digitised in collections, for instance at the German Historical Museum and in the psywarrior.com collection of American veterans. Lazarsfeld’s experiment can be repeated on a small scale: whoever notes before an election where his opinion of a candidate comes from rarely finds a broadcast and often a person.

The bottleneck. By 1945 the warring parties had learned to reach every house and to forge the sender, and researchers knew that messages run through people and that one forgets the source. But the black stations were expensive, tied to wars and easy to unmask as soon as the opponent looked; Delmer’s stations lived on the certainty that nobody in Germany could check. For a peace in which two systems watched each other for decades, a more patient method was needed: a lie that came not over a station but through other people’s newspapers.

3. Transmitters, balloons and active measures (1945–1989)

The stations of the West. After 1945 the instrument of war became a permanent institution. On 4 July 1950 Radio Free Europe broadcast its first half hour to Czechoslovakia, from New York via a transmitter on a lorry at Lampertheim; from May 1951 the programme came from the headquarters by the Englischer Garten in Munich; on 1 March 1953 Radio Liberation, later Radio Liberty, followed for the Soviet Union, four days before Stalin’s death.²¹ The stations presented themselves as institutions of private American citizens; they were paid for covertly by the CIA for more than twenty years, until Senator Clifford Case introduced a bill on 25 January 1971 and made public that the intelligence agency had paid more than thirty million dollars in the last fiscal year.²² In Washington a Psychological Strategy Board coordinated propaganda against the Eastern bloc from 4 April 1951.²³ For long stretches the stations broadcast news that listeners did not get in their own country, and were thus white in substance and grey in sender, a mixture typical of the Cold War.

Balloons, money and ghosts. Where there was shooting, the leaflet remained. In the Korean War more than two billion of them came down from 1950 to 1953, and Operation Moolah promised every North Korean pilot 50,000 dollars for an undamaged MiG-15; when a pilot defected with his aircraft in September 1953, he had known nothing of the offer.²⁴ In Vietnam the Chieu Hoi programme, “open arms”, offered Viet Cong fighters a way over from 1963, and by 1973 almost 160,000 people had defected, of whom, however, only some were really fighters.²⁵ A psychological operations battalion played tapes at night from loudspeakers with wailing voices meant to represent the souls of fallen fighters who had not been buried at home, using a belief of the opponents against them; the effect was disputed.²⁶

Germany. The Bundeswehr also built up a force for it. From 1957 the defence ministry under Franz Josef Strauß planned a psychological warfare branch, in August 1958 the desk for it was created, on 1 October 1959 the troop from which today’s Bundeswehr Centre for Operational Communication in Mayen emerged; according to reports, balloons with leaflets rose along the inner-German border until the 1970s.²⁷ The other side broadcast from the GDR: the Deutscher Freiheitssender 904 posed from 1956 as a secret station of West German communists, the Deutscher Soldatensender 935 addressed the soldiers of the Bundeswehr in order to undermine them, both black stations on the British model.²⁸ They ended with détente, and on 1 July 1990 the ministry abolished psychological defence as a peacetime task.²⁷

The lie through the newspaper. The more patient form of influence was developed by the Soviet Union. Disinformation is the deliberate spreading of false or misleading information in order to deceive a public; the Russian word dezinformatsiya denoted a craft in the intelligence service. The KGB called the totality of these means active measures, aktivnye meropriyatiya: forged documents, planted newspaper articles, paid journalists, front organisations and rumours brought abroad by roundabout routes. In 1959 the First Chief Directorate set up a Department D for this, later expanded into Service A; in 1985, according to a study by the CIA historian Thomas Boghardt, some eighty officers worked there at headquarters, and every foreign intelligence officer was expected to spend part of his time on it.²⁹ The foreign intelligence arm of the Stasi, the HVA, had its own Department X under Colonel Rolf Wagenbreth, with some sixty officers, and Wagenbreth is said to have described his work like this: the friends in Moscow called it disinformation, the enemies in America active measures, and he called it his favourite pastime.²⁹

INFEKTION. The best-known example shows how it worked. On 17 July 1983 the Indian newspaper Patriot, which the KGB financed, printed an anonymous letter from a supposedly well-known American scientist: AIDS had originated in Pentagon experiments at Fort Detrick and could come to India. For two years nothing happened. On 30 October 1985 the Soviet Literaturnaya Gazeta picked up the letter and cited the Patriot as its source; a KGB telegram to the Bulgarian service of 7 September had announced the campaign. In 1986 the retired East Berlin biologist Jakob Segal and his wife supplied a report that made the thesis sound scientific, partly with HVA material, and KGB and Stasi officers distributed it at the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Harare. By the end of 1987 the claim was in the media of more than eighty countries.³⁰ The files call the operation “Denver”; the word INFEKTION comes from the memory of a former HVA officer.³¹ In 1992 Yevgeny Primakov, the head of the Russian foreign intelligence service, admitted that the KGB had been behind it (Figure 3).²⁹

Repetition. INFEKTION lived on a mechanism that psychology had measured in 1977. Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein and Thomas Toppino presented students in several sessions with plausible statements, true and false, some of them several times; the subjects considered the repeated statements more likely to be true, whether they were or not.³² This illusory truth effect explains why a lie that appears in eighty countries carries more weight than one that appears in one, even if all eighty copied from each other. The other side responded with an agency: in 1981 the Reagan administration set up a working group of the State Department, CIA, Information Agency and Defense Department, the Active Measures Working Group, which collected forgeries, exposed them and supplied material to the embassies.²⁹

Try it yourself. Boghardt’s essay on the AIDS campaign is freely available as a PDF on the CIA website and reads like a textbook: every station, every newspaper, every intermediary. Whoever types the claim that a virus came from an American laboratory into a search engine today finds it again with every new pathogen, with the same place, Fort Detrick. The study by Hasher and colleagues can be experienced first hand: an unknown claim read three times in a week feels familiar the fourth time, and familiar feels like true.

The bottleneck. By 1989 the services of both sides mastered transmitters, leaflets, black propaganda and the planted lie. But every operation needed people: journalists who were paid, newspapers that were financed, officers who wrote letters and distributed reports, and it needed time; INFEKTION took four years to reach the world. With the end of the Cold War the craft lost its opponent and the agencies their money. What came was a medium in which anyone could publish without a newspaper, and in which nobody knew who the other was.

4. The net and the sock puppet (1990–2013)

The last leaflet war. The Gulf War of 1991 was once more a war of leaflets. From 30 December 1990 to 28 February 1991 the American psychological operations force, according to its veterans, dropped more than 29 million leaflets in over a hundred versions on the Iraqi positions, many of them calling for surrender, and most of the roughly 87,000 Iraqi soldiers who surrendered or were captured had some on them.³³ How many of them would have given up without a leaflet nobody knows. Doctrine, though, had already left the leaflet behind. On 9 October 1998 the American Joint Chiefs of Staff published their joint doctrine for information operations: actions taken to affect adversary information and information systems while defending one’s own.³⁴ Psychological warfare had thus become part of a larger whole that included deception, electronic warfare and attacks on networks, and the net was its new field.

The data of the campaign. The next innovation came not from the military but from the election campaign. Barack Obama’s re-election campaign of 2012 built up a data analysis department in a windowless room of its Chicago headquarters, “the cave”, five times the size of 2008’s, which calculated from voter lists, polls, donations and contacts whom which message would reach through which channel.³⁵ That was open, legal and white in sender, but it showed what became possible when computers knew who was who.

The sock puppet. What the black station had been on the airwaves, the fake account became on the net. A sock puppet is an invented person on the net behind whom someone else is hiding, an account with name, photo and story that pretends to speak for itself. On 17 March 2011 the Guardian reported that the American Central Command for the Middle East had ordered software for managing online personas from the company Ntrepid for about 2.76 million dollars: one operator was to run up to ten invented identities, each with background, history and details that were technically, culturally and geographically consistent, in order to write against the propaganda of extremists in forums and networks in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto; it would not be used in English or against Americans, the command assured.³⁶ Three years later documents from Edward Snowden’s archive showed that the British signals intelligence agency GCHQ maintained a unit called JTRIG which in a training course of 2012 taught deception on the net: false identities, claims spread in order to destroy the reputation of targets, and a dedicated cell for methods from behavioural science.³⁷ So the West had described the sock puppet as a tool before its opponents did, as one for use in foreign languages against foreign groups.

The Fifty Cent Party. China did the same inwards, on a scale that surpassed everything. Popular parlance gave the state’s paid commentators the name Fifty Cent Party, after the amount they supposedly received per post. The political scientists Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret Roberts analysed leaked e-mails of a propaganda office and estimated in 2017 that the government has about 448 million fabricated posts published on social networks every year. Their finding was surprising: the posts did not argue with critics but distracted, with cheerleading for China, the history of the Party and its symbols, precisely when something was brewing on the net.³⁸ This form, which fakes a movement from below where an organisation steers from above, is called astroturfing, after an American brand of artificial turf. It is the grey propaganda of the net: nobody names the sender, and every post looks as if it came from an ordinary user.

Try it yourself. The study by King, Pan and Roberts can be read freely on Gary King’s website, with examples of the posts; whoever reads it recognises a style that can be found in every comment section, the sudden praise that distracts from the subject. The JTRIG slides were published by The Intercept; the slide with the means of deception reads like a list of what state actors from Russia, China and Iran were accused of ten years later.

The bottleneck. By 2013 militaries, services and governments had invented the sock puppet, campaigners data analysis and China the mass. But every puppet needed someone to operate it, who wrote the language of the target country, knew the subtleties of its quarrels and day after day composed posts that did not sound like an agency. Ten personas per operator was the limit. What was missing was an organisation that turned this into an industry, and a way of showing the right message to the right person.

5. Troll factory, bot and profile (2013–2018)

The factory. In July 2013 a company called the Internet Research Agency registered in Saint Petersburg. From 2014 it sat in an office building at 55 Savushkina Street, employed hundreds of people in shifts and had a department that from April 2014 dealt only with the United States; it was paid through the Concord companies of the businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, a confidant of Putin, and in September 2016 the monthly budget of the overall project, internally called Lakhta, was more than 73 million roubles, over 1.25 million dollars.³⁹ A troll factory of this kind is an organisation in which employed writers run sock puppets at piece rates, compose posts, found groups and stoke quarrels, with daily quotas, topic guidelines and performance checks. What in 2011 had been ten personas per operator were here hundreds of operators with thousands of personas, and they wrote in English for an American audience, not about but as Americans: as black civil rights activists, as Texan separatists, as Christian conservatives and as Muslims.

The firehose. What this was meant to achieve was described by two researchers of the RAND Corporation in 2016. Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews called the Russian pattern the firehose of falsehood: high-volume and multichannel, rapid, continuous and repetitive, without commitment to objective reality and without commitment to consistency. What matters is not that a claim is believed but that so many contradictory claims are in circulation that nobody knows what to believe any more; one should not, they wrote, expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth.⁴⁰ An alleged Russian plan behind it, the Gerasimov doctrine, was on the other hand an invention of the West: the British expert Mark Galeotti had given this label in 2014 to an article by the Russian chief of the general staff from February 2013 and apologised for it in 2018 because it was not a doctrine.⁴¹

The balance of 2016. How far the factory reached was shown by the platforms only when Congress asked. On 31 October 2017 Facebook testified that the Internet Research Agency had published some 80,000 posts on 120 pages from January 2015 to August 2017, which had reached 29 million people directly and with sharing may have been shown to up to 126 million, plus more than 3,000 ads for about 100,000 dollars. By January 2018 Twitter found 3,814 accounts of the factory and 50,258 automated accounts linked to Russia and notified 677,775 users who had interacted with them.⁴² On 16 February 2018 Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted thirteen Russians and three companies, among them the Internet Research Agency and Concord.³⁹ Whether all this decided the election cannot be proved; in 2019 the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded on a bipartisan basis that the factory had tried, on the Kremlin’s instructions, to influence it to Hillary Clinton’s detriment and Donald Trump’s benefit.⁴³

The bot. To the factory came the machine that needs no shifts. A social bot is an account on a social network that is run by a program instead of a person and passes itself off as a person: it shares, replies, follows and sets hashtags, around the clock. The computer scientists Alessandro Bessi and Emilio Ferrara analysed 20 million tweets from the 2016 campaign and estimated that about 19 per cent of them came from bots and about 15 per cent of the accounts involved were bots; a second study estimated in 2017 that 9 to 15 per cent of all active Twitter accounts were bots.⁴⁴ The bots of 2016 were still stupid. They could repeat and amplify but not write; what they spread had to be composed by people.

The profile. The second solution concerned the recipient. The psychologist Michal Kosinski and his colleagues in Cambridge showed in 2013, with the data of more than 58,000 volunteers, that their Facebook likes could predict who was gay or straight (correctly distinguished in 88 per cent of cases), who was black or white (95 per cent) and who was a Democrat or Republican (85 per cent).⁴⁵ In 2015 they measured how well a program judged personality by the five big traits, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, the Big Five model of psychology: with ten likes it was better than a work colleague, with 300 better than the spouse (Figure 4).⁴⁶ In 2017 the field experiment followed. Sandra Matz and Kosinski showed 3.5 million people advertising tailored to their estimated personality and achieved up to 40 per cent more clicks and up to 50 per cent more purchases than with unsuitable advertising; the authors themselves warned of misuse.⁴⁷ Microtargeting means addressing a message not to everyone but to small groups or individuals whose characteristics one knows from data; psychological targeting is the form that selects by personality instead of by place of residence or age.

Cambridge Analytica. How much of this arrived in politics became a world topic in March 2018. On 17 March the Observer, the Guardian and the New York Times reported, based on statements by the former employee Christopher Wylie, that the British consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which had worked for Trump’s campaign, held the data of millions of Facebook users. In 2014 the psychologist Aleksandr Kogan had recruited some 270,000 paid participants with a personality quiz app called thisisyourdigitallife, and the app also read the data of their friends; in April Facebook put the number of those affected at up to 87 million.⁴⁸ On 2 May 2018 the company filed for insolvency, the British data protection authority imposed the maximum of 500,000 pounds on Facebook, the American Federal Trade Commission five billion dollars in 2019.⁴⁸ Less well known is the conclusion of the British investigation. After analysing more than 300,000 documents the data protection authority wrote in October 2020 that the company’s methods had in the main been well recognised processes using commonly available technology.⁴⁹ The psychological targeting the company had advertised was scientifically possible, but whether it mastered it remained unproven. The scandal was about the data, not about the effect.

The world. The tools spread faster than the evidence of their effect. Samuel Woolley and Philip Howard of the Oxford Internet Institute called the whole thing computational propaganda: the use of algorithms, automation and human curation to purposefully distribute misleading information over social media networks.⁵⁰ Their colleagues counted governments or parties that manipulated social networks in an organised way in 28 countries in 2017, in 70 in 2019 and in 81 in the report of January 2021.⁵¹ On 5 May 2017, shortly before the run-off in France, some nine gigabytes of hacked e-mails from Emmanuel Macron’s campaign appeared on the net, mixed with forgeries; security firms attributed the attack to Russian military intelligence, the election commission warned the media against spreading the files, and Macron won the election.⁵²

Try it yourself. Facebook and Instagram show in their ad settings which interest groups the platform has assigned a user to. Whoever looks through this list sees what an advertiser can select him by. Twitter published the data sets of the Internet Research Agency in 2018, and researchers have compiled collections from them in which one can read how employees in Saint Petersburg wrote as American activists.

The bottleneck. By 2018 there was the factory that ran thousands of personas, the bot that amplified them and the profile that picked the recipient. But every text, every picture and every reply still had to be written by a person, in the language of the target and in such a way that it did not stand out. And the platforms, the states and the researchers began to strike back. What was missing were rules, yardsticks for effect and a machine that could write.

6. Rules, yardsticks and the fake (2017–2022)

The platforms clean up. The first response came from the platforms themselves. On 31 July 2018 Facebook deleted 32 pages and accounts whose originators it could not name with certainty, though some had been connected with known accounts of the Internet Research Agency, and used a term for it that has appeared in every report since: coordinated inauthentic behaviour. It means that several accounts work together to deceive about their identity or their purpose; the platform deletes them not because of what they say but because of how they do it. The security chief Nathaniel Gleicher explained the term in detail in December 2018, and the deletions turned into regular reports.⁵³ How urgent that was, Myanmar showed. The United Nations fact-finding mission called Facebook a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate in September 2018, after Reuters had found more than a thousand hate posts against the Rohingya, and in November Facebook admitted that it had not done enough to prevent its platform from being used to foment division and incite violence.⁵⁴

The states regulate. With the Network Enforcement Act, from 1 October 2017 Germany obliged large platforms to delete obviously illegal content within 24 hours, with fines of up to 50 million euros.⁵⁵ In March 2015 the European Union had decided to build a small unit in its External Action Service, the East StratCom Task Force, which collects Russian disinformation and makes it public in the EUvsDisinfo database.⁵⁶ In autumn 2018 Facebook, Google, Twitter and Mozilla signed a voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation, and on 5 December 2018 the Commission and the High Representative presented an action plan.⁵⁷ In 2022 the Digital Services Act followed, which obliges the largest platforms to assess and mitigate the risks of their services for elections and public debate.⁵⁸

The fake. At the same time black propaganda got a new tool. In December 2017 the magazine Motherboard reported on a Reddit user called deepfakes who used freely available machine-learning programs to insert the faces of actresses into pornographic videos. The name became a term: a deepfake is an image, video or audio recording generated or altered with machine learning that shows a real person saying or doing something they never said or did.⁵⁹ The lawyers Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron foresaw in 2018 that the greater danger was not the fake itself but its shadow: when everyone knows that recordings can be faked, every liar can dismiss a genuine recording as a fake. They called this the liar’s dividend.⁶⁰ The first fake meant to decide a war came in March 2022, a video in which President Zelensky supposedly called on his soldiers to surrender; it was badly made and quickly refuted.

The machine learns to write. On 14 February 2019 OpenAI presented GPT-2, a language model, that is a program that has learned from large amounts of text to write the most probable continuation of a beginning, and thereby produces texts that sound as if written by people. The company held back the full model for fear that it could be misused for misleading news articles and impersonating others online; in November 2019 it released it after all and wrote that it had seen no strong evidence of misuse so far.⁶¹ Researchers tested what the worry was worth. In an experiment at the University of Washington readers rated the disinformation of a model called Grover as more trustworthy than that written by people.⁶² Sarah Kreps and colleagues showed in 2020 that readers could hardly distinguish news from GPT-2 from real news.⁶³ And in May 2021 the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown had the larger GPT-3 carry out six tasks of an influence operation, from reiterating a narrative to wedging groups apart; after subjects had read five messages of the model selected by people, the share of those who opposed sanctions against China doubled. The researchers concluded that the model was strongest in a team with people, and that defence should start with the fake accounts, not with detecting texts.⁶⁴

The yardstick. To know whether an operation was dangerous one needed a yardstick, and it was supplied in September 2020 by Ben Nimmo, who investigated influence operations for the company Graphika. His Breakout Scale rates an operation by its reach in six categories: category 1 stays in one community on one platform, category 2 reaches several platforms or several communities, category 3 both, category 4 is picked up by mainstream media, category 5 amplified by celebrities or politicians, and category 6 triggers a policy response or calls for violence (Figure 5).⁶⁵ The scale does not measure whether anyone changed their mind but whether the operation got out of its bubble, and it became the tool with which platforms and AI companies classified their findings.

The inoculation. The third response was aimed at readers. As early as 1961 the psychologist William McGuire had shown that attitudes are better protected against persuasion if people are first shown weakened counter-arguments and their refutation than if they are merely confirmed in their opinion; on the model of medicine he called this inoculation against persuasion.⁶⁶ The Cambridge psychologists Jon Roozenbeek and Sander van der Linden turned it into a game. In Bad News the players take on the role of a producer of disinformation, and after the game some 15,000 participants rated false reports on average 21 per cent less credible, without trusting real news less.⁶⁷ In August 2022, with Google, they showed 5.4 million Americans on YouTube short videos that each explained one trick, emotional language, false dichotomies, scapegoating, and viewers recognised the tricks somewhat more often afterwards; Google’s Jigsaw unit used the method from August 2022 in Poland, Czechia and Slovakia against false reports about Ukrainian refugees and from February 2023 in Germany too.⁶⁸ Prebunking is the name for this prevention: explaining the method of a deception before the deception arrives, instead of refuting it afterwards.

One’s own side. The rules did not apply only to the others. From spring 2020 to mid-2021, according to a Reuters investigation, the American military ran a covert campaign in the Philippines against the Chinese vaccine Sinovac, with at least 300 fake accounts on X, in the middle of a pandemic.⁶⁹ And in September 2022 the Brussels organisation EU DisinfoLab described a Russian operation that it called Doppelganger because it rebuilt the websites of real European newspapers, Der Spiegel, Bild, the Guardian, under deceptively similar addresses, and published invented articles against Ukraine and the sanctions on them; Meta deleted the network of more than sixty imitated news sites and called it the largest and most complex Russian-origin operation since the beginning of the war.⁷⁰ That was black propaganda as with Delmer, only that the false sender was now a real newspaper.

Try it yourself. Bad News can be played free of charge at getbadnews.com and takes a quarter of an hour; whoever has played it through recognises the six tricks in his own news stream afterwards. Meta publishes its reports on coordinated inauthentic behaviour quarterly, with examples of the deleted posts. And whoever checks the address in the browser bar for a report that appears on a well-known newspaper page performs the test on which Doppelganger failed.

The bottleneck. By 2022 there were rules for platforms, a measure of reach, an inoculation for readers and a language model that could write, if still clumsily. The operations, on the other hand, still lived on people who composed texts for each language and each country, and they mostly stayed in category 1 or 2: much noise, little effect. What the factory in Saint Petersburg would have needed was a writer who mastered every language, never got tired and cost nothing. On 30 November 2022 OpenAI presented ChatGPT.

7. The machine writes (2023–2024)

The prediction. In January 2023, six weeks after ChatGPT, researchers from Georgetown, OpenAI and the Stanford Internet Observatory led by Josh Goldstein published a study on what language models would change about influence operations: the actors, because more and smaller groups can take part, the behaviour, because operations can more easily be scaled up and tailored to individuals, and the content, because texts are more persuasive and harder to detect. They described four points at which one can intervene: in building the model, in access to the model, in dissemination and in the belief formation of the readers, and they wrote that no single measure was enough (Figure 6).⁷¹ An influence operation in the sense of this research is a covert attempt to steer the opinions of an audience in which the principal deceives about his identity or his purpose; it includes the sock puppets, the troll factory, black propaganda and everything the platforms call coordinated inauthentic behaviour.

The wish list. The militaries thought of it too. In March 2023 The Intercept published a requirements list of the American Special Operations Command which under the heading of influence operations sought capabilities for digital deception and disinformation campaigns, including deepfake videos to generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels.⁷² In October 2024 a list of the Joint Special Operations Command followed that sought convincing invented internet users.⁷²

The market. Besides states, private firms sold influence as a service. In February 2023 a consortium of newsrooms around Forbidden Stories, among them the Guardian, Der Spiegel and Le Monde, published covertly recorded conversations with a group of former members of Israeli security services around Tal Hanan, whom the reporters called Team Jorge after his alias. Hanan offered his services to intelligence agencies, election campaigns and companies, among them software called Aims for running fake accounts, and claimed to have worked on 33 presidential campaigns and won 27 of them, two thirds in Africa; all that is proven is that he said so. Hanan denied any wrongdoing.⁷³

The first findings. What the perpetrators did with the models was shown first by the companies that offered them. On 30 May 2024 OpenAI published its first report on covert influence operations that had used ChatGPT: Bad Grammar from Russia, which wrote on Telegram about Ukraine, Moldova and the Baltics, the known operation Doppelganger, the Chinese network Spamouflage, the Iranian IUVM and a campaign of the Israeli company STOIC that OpenAI called Zero Zeno. The models wrote posts and comments in many languages, translated and proofread, but none of the five operations rose above category 2 on the Breakout Scale. OpenAI summed this up as evolution, not revolution.⁷⁴ Behind STOIC, according to reports in the New York Times, stood the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, which had paid about two million dollars for a campaign with hundreds of fake accounts that worked on American members of Congress with posts about the Gaza war, partly written with ChatGPT; the ministry denied this, and Meta deleted 510 of the company’s accounts.⁷⁵ Meta had already removed Spamouflage in August 2023 in the largest takedown in its history, 7,704 accounts, and found that despite its size the network hardly reached anyone outside its own echo.⁷⁶ By October 2024 OpenAI counted more than twenty disrupted operations, most with little resonance.⁷⁴

The voice. Where the fake worked, it was rarely the text. Two days before the parliamentary election in Slovakia on 30 September 2023, during the election silence, an audio recording spread on Facebook in which the liberal Michal Šimečka talked with a journalist about buying votes in the Roma minority; fact-checkers found traces of AI generation, but the platform’s policies at the time covered only videos.⁷⁷ On 21 January 2024, two days before the primary, voters in New Hampshire received calls with the artificial voice of Joe Biden advising them not to vote; a political consultant had ordered the recording from a magician, who made it with the ElevenLabs service. On 8 February 2024 the Federal Communications Commission declared AI-generated voices in automated calls unlawful and fined the consultant six million dollars; a jury in New Hampshire acquitted him on all counts in June 2025.⁷⁸ At the election in Taiwan in January 2024 Microsoft, by its own account, observed for the first time a state actor using AI-generated content to influence a foreign election: a fake audio recording in which a businessman endorsed a candidate, and news anchors who did not exist.⁷⁹

The factory without workers. At the same time manual work disappeared from the factories. On 9 July 2024 the FBI and authorities of Canada and the Netherlands made public a piece of software called Meliorator that ran bot farms with AI, 968 accounts on X with invented biographies that wrote and spread posts on their own; according to the court papers, its development had been organised by an unnamed former deputy editor-in-chief of the state broadcaster RT.⁸⁰ As early as January 2024 the German Foreign Office had counted some 50,000 fake accounts that had published more than a million German-language posts on X in one month for Doppelganger, automated and steered by algorithms.⁸¹ On 4 September 2024 the American Justice Department seized 32 domains of the operation and named as operators the Moscow Social Design Agency and the company Structura, acting on behalf of the Presidential Administration.⁸² And in February 2024 the French agency Viginum had described a network of at least 193 websites that it called Portal Kombat: sites without content of their own that only repeated Russian sources, many with the word Pravda in their name.⁸³ Nobody read them. What they were for became clear a year later.

The effect. That left the question whether the machine persuaded. In a study published in February 2024, Goldstein and colleagues had shown 8,221 Americans in December 2021 articles of real Iranian and Russian propaganda and, next to them, articles that GPT-3 had written on the same theses: without an article 24 per cent agreed with the theses, after the real propaganda 47 per cent, after the model’s text 44 per cent, and when a person selected the texts the model was as persuasive as the original.⁸⁴ In September 2024 Thomas Costello, Gordon Pennycook and David Rand had 2,190 people who believed in a conspiracy theory talk about it with GPT-4, and the belief fell on average by about 20 per cent and remained lower two months later.⁸⁵ So the model could persuade, and in both directions. The super election year 2024 nevertheless passed without any demonstrable upheaval through AI. The Alan Turing Institute found a few dozen AI fakes that went viral in the elections in Britain and the EU and no measurable effect on the results, but warned of second-order harms such as distrust, and Meta counted less than one per cent AI among the fact-checked false reports in the major elections.⁸⁶

The annulment. The one election that actually fell did not fall through a deepfake. On 6 December 2024 the Romanian Constitutional Court unanimously declared the entire presidential election invalid, whose first round had been won by the previously little-known Călin Georgescu, after President Iohannis had declassified intelligence reports: a coordinated campaign on TikTok and Telegram with some 25,000 accounts and payments of 381,000 dollars to TikTok users.⁸⁷ It was the first time a member state of the European Union had an election repeated because of an influence operation on social networks, and the means was not the machine but paid amplification.

Try it yourself. The reports of OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft and Anthropic on disrupted operations are freely available online, with screenshots of the posts and often with the instructions the perpetrators gave the model. Whoever reads them sees how banal most of it is: comments praising an article, translations, CVs for invented journalists. The experiment by Costello and colleagues can be recreated at debunkbot.com, where a model talks with the visitor about a conspiracy theory of his choice; whoever does it experiences how patiently and well-informed a machine argues, and can imagine how the same patience works in the other direction.

The bottleneck. By 2024 the machine wrote, translated, ran accounts and in experiments persuaded as well as the propaganda of states. But the operations that used it mostly stayed in their bubble, because writing was not the problem; the problem was that nobody read the posts, the fake accounts stood out and the platforms deleted them. What the perpetrators needed was access to real readers and real conversations, and for that the machines had not only to write but to decide for themselves whom to talk to, and to work their way into where readers now looked for their answers: into the models themselves.

8. Persuasion, agents and the open question (since 2025)

The readers are machines. In February 2025 the American Sunlight Project explained what Portal Kombat was for. By its estimate the network published more than 3.6 million articles a year, on sites without a search function and with broken navigation that were useless to people; their audience, it said, were the programs that comb the net for the training of language models and for the search of chatbots. The researchers called this LLM grooming: the targeted feeding of the sources from which language models learn and quote, so that they reproduce a narrative.⁸⁸ In March 2025 NewsGuard tested ten chatbots with fifteen false claims from the network and found that they repeated them in about a third of the answers.⁸⁹ In October 2025 the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found references to Russian state sources in 18 per cent of the answers of four chatbots to questions about the war in Ukraine, the more so the more manipulatively the question was put, and explained this rather with data voids: topics on which there are few reliable texts, so that any source that writes something about them is found.⁹⁰ Whether the models are really being poisoned or are only searching where nothing else is written is disputed. In April 2026 the Digital Forensic Research Lab showed that the network’s English articles in the most important public text archive of the net had grown from 37 in November 2024 to some 40,000 in November 2025 and that a large model could reproduce an RT article almost word for word; that it had been trained on them this did not prove.⁹¹

The agent runs the accounts. In April 2025 Anthropic for the first time described an operation in which a model did not only write but decided. A commercial provider of influence as a service had used Claude to run more than a hundred accounts on X and Facebook with their own political personas; the model decided for each account whether to like, share, comment on or ignore a post, and the accounts talked with tens of thousands of real users without anything going viral.⁹² An AI agent, a program of language model and tools that carries out multi-step tasks step by step without guidance, here replaced the shift worker of the troll factory. In June 2025 OpenAI found among ten operations a Russian one called Helgoland Bite which before the Bundestag election wrote German texts against the United States and NATO and for the AfD, through a Telegram channel and an account on X with more than 27,000 followers and an AI profile picture; its texts turned up word for word on the German site of the Pravda network.⁹³ In August 2025 researchers at Vanderbilt University described documents of the Chinese company GoLaxy, which used AI-generated personas in Hong Kong and Taiwan and had compiled profiles of at least 117 American members of Congress and more than 2,000 other public figures; the company denied having targeted American officials.⁹⁴

Germany. The Bundestag election of 23 February 2025 was a testing ground. A Russian operation that Microsoft calls Storm-1516 ran, according to research by Correctiv, more than a hundred invented news sites with AI texts and spread fake videos about politicians; alongside it ran Doppelganger and an operation that passed off videos with AI voices as reports by well-known media.⁹⁵ The European Union imposed sanctions on those involved in July 2025, and on 12 December 2025 the German Foreign Office summoned the Russian ambassador; the federal government attributed Storm-1516 to a Moscow institution supported by the GRU military intelligence service.⁹⁵ In September 2026, at the state elections in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Berlin, videos spread of a supposed pensioner couple from Rostock whose postal ballot was said to be missing the AfD; one post on X was viewed more than three million times, a detection tool of the Fraunhofer Institute AISEC rated the videos 99.8 and 99.9 per cent likely AI-generated, and researchers saw the same operation behind them.⁹⁶ In Moldova the BBC and the newspaper Ziarul de Gardă showed before the parliamentary election in September 2025 how a network paid by Russia recruited people, some two hundred according to the newspaper, who published posts on TikTok and Facebook for money, learning to use ChatGPT, but sparingly, so that it looked genuine.⁹⁷ The machine and the paid human now worked together, each where he stood out least.

Persuasion is measured. What had been a question in 2024 became a finding in 2025. In May 2025 Francesco Salvi and colleagues had 900 Americans debate contested questions with GPT-4 or with people; when the model knew some details about its counterpart, age, gender, education, political leaning, it won 64 per cent of the debates that did not end in a draw, and the odds that the counterpart afterwards stood closer to its position rose by 81 per cent; people with the same details did not become more persuasive.⁹⁸ In April 2025 it became known that researchers at the University of Zurich had, without the users’ knowledge, published more than 1,700 comments by language models in the Reddit forum r/changemyview, in which people want to be persuaded by counter-arguments, partly as a supposed rape victim or as a trauma counsellor, tailored to the presumed age, gender and political attitude of those addressed; Reddit spoke of a serious breach of its rules, and the researchers decided not to publish.⁹⁹ On 4 December 2025 two large studies appeared on the same day. Kobi Hackenburg and colleagues had 76,977 Britons talk with 19 models about 707 political questions: the strongest levers were post-training and the instruction to give as many facts as possible, stronger than adaptation to the person or the size of the model, and the more persuasively a model argued, the less accurate its claims.¹⁰⁰ Hause Lin, David Rand and colleagues had voters talk before the elections in the United States, Canada and Poland with models that campaigned for a candidate and measured shifts of about four points among Trump supporters in America and about ten in Canada and Poland; advertising for the other side had moved comparable American voters by only about one point in 2016 and 2020. A third of the effect lasted a month (Figure 7).¹⁰¹ This was measured, however, in conversations that participants held attentively over several rounds. How much of it works when a post only flits past in the stream of a social network, these experiments do not say.

The swarm. In January 2026 more than twenty researchers drew up the balance in Science. What was coming, they wrote, were AI swarms: groups of agents with persistent identities and memory that act in coordination towards a common goal, learn from resonance and adapt, and whose greatest danger is a synthetic consensus, the impression that many independent people think the same. As countermeasures they proposed detecting statistically improbable agreement and reducing the incentives for inauthentic engagement.¹⁰² The swarm is the end of the chain in Figure 1: the two-step flow of 1944, only that the opinion leaders are invented, and the illusory truth effect of 1977, only that the repetitions come from a thousand voices that are one.

The states. The states went in opposite directions. The United States dismantled its defences: the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which tracked foreign disinformation, closed in December 2024, its successor office in April 2025; in February 2025 the Justice Department disbanded the FBI task force on foreign influence, and in August 2025 the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center was dissolved or folded into other units.¹⁰³ At the same time Defence Secretary Hegseth gave the troops their old name back in December 2025, psychological operations instead of military information support, and according to a requirements list of August 2025 the Special Operations Command sought systems of several agents to scale up influence operations and suppress dissenting arguments.¹⁰⁴ The European Union built up. On 5 December 2025 it imposed the first penalty under the Digital Services Act, 120 million euros against X, among other things for the deceptive blue tick that anyone could buy; in November 2025 it presented a European Democracy Shield; and since 2 August 2026 the AI Act has required deepfakes to be labelled as artificially generated, supplemented by a Code of Practice of June 2026 for labelling.¹⁰⁵

The check. Labelling presupposes that the fake can be recognised, and that succeeded less well than making it. In July 2023 OpenAI took its own tool for detecting machine-written text offline: it had recognised only 26 per cent of AI texts as such and taken 9 per cent of human texts for machine-written.¹⁰⁶ A digital watermark, a pattern invisible to the eye that a generator embeds in its images, could according to a University of Maryland study of September 2023 be removed by adding noise to the image and having an image model denoise it again, and conversely be stamped onto real images.¹⁰⁷ In a sample by the specialist service Indicator in autumn 2025, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok and YouTube labelled only 169 of 516 posts with AI images and videos as such, including content that Google’s and Meta’s own tools had generated; the platforms displayed the embedded provenance data under the C2PA standard inconsistently.¹⁰⁸ Faking cost almost nothing; checking remained expensive.

The elections of 2026. In Hungary the governing party Fidesz used AI-generated videos against the challenger Péter Magyar before the election in April 2026, one of them showing the invented execution of a soldier, others Magyar as Zelensky’s puppet; Magyar’s party Tisza won with a two-thirds majority, and researchers of the European Digital Media Observatory wrote that the manipulation had been only partially successful and that nine out of ten respondents found it unacceptable.¹⁰⁹ In the war of the United States and Israel against Iran from the end of February 2026, AI fakes of missile strikes and captured soldiers reached tens of millions of views, and X withdrew revenue for ninety days from accounts posting war videos without labelling.¹¹⁰ Before the American midterm elections in November 2026, the Wesleyan Media Project counted by mid-October 220 AI-generated campaign ads on which more than 137 million dollars had been spent, against less than 50,000 dollars in the 2024 campaign, and 69 per cent carried no notice of it.¹¹¹ White propaganda, under its own name, now used the machine more openly than black.

The first breakout. In September 2026 Anthropic described nine influence operations that had used Claude between December 2025 and August 2026, among them a Russian one in the Central African Republic that ran a radio station, forged documents and spied on opposition figures and that Anthropic rated category 4, and a French advertising agency that spread thousands of articles in twenty languages with some seventy invented news sites, above all about the Democratic Republic of the Congo.¹¹² On 8 October 2026 OpenAI reported on a Russian operation in Latin America that ran an invented research centre with an invented director and recruited real authors who did not know whom they were writing for, and on an Iranian one that placed almost a hundred articles in a dozen media outlets with seven invented journalists; OpenAI rated the Russian one the first operation in category 5, the Iranian one category 4.¹¹³ What INFEKTION had begun in 1983 with a paid paper in New Delhi, the lie through someone else’s newspaper, was now done by a machine that invented the journalist and recruited the real one.

Try it yourself. One’s own susceptibility can be measured, and that is the most honest approach. Ask a chatbot a question on a topic about which little reliable material is on the net, say about a town in a war zone, and look at which sources it names; ask the same question once neutrally and once with an insinuation and compare the answers. Give a model the task of defending a position different from one’s own as persuasively as possible, note after ten minutes whether one concedes it a point, and then check each of its factual claims. Whoever does this experiences the two studies of December 2025 on his own mind: the model persuades with many facts, and not all of them are true.

The bottleneck. The chain of this text ends with an open link. Every stage since 1914 has shifted a piece of the work between the principal and the mind he wants to reach onto a new means: carrying onto the leaflet, reaching onto broadcasting, concealing onto the planted rumour, inventing the sender onto the sock puppet, multiplying onto the factory, selecting onto the profile, writing onto the model, finally acting itself onto the agent. What remains is what could never be shifted: the question of who is speaking, and the decision whether to believe him. It is open whether readers, platforms and authorities can recognise a swarm that looks like a society. It is open whether the liar’s dividend becomes greater than the damage of the lies themselves, when every inconvenient recording counts as a fake. It is open whether models that argue more patiently and better informed than people are more likely to dissolve conspiracy beliefs or to shift elections, and who decides that. And it is open whether democracies that do not want to patronise their citizens can protect them against a persuasive power that no longer reveals itself as propaganda. The answer will not be given in the machine but where it has been given since the first leaflet: by the person who reads a message and asks who sent it.

The chain in brief

1. Wellington House, Creel’s committee and Crewe House (1914–1918) make propaganda an agency and the leaflet a weapon; Lasswell and Bernays make it a science; but the leaflet recognisably comes from the enemy.
2. Broadcasting and the People’s Receiver (1933) bring reach, Delmer’s black stations (1941–1945) the false sender; Lazarsfeld and Hovland find the two-step flow and the sleeper effect; the lie needs a war.
3. Radio Free Europe, the Bundeswehr’s balloons and the KGB’s active measures (1950–1989) make influence a permanent task; INFEKTION shows how a lie gets into eighty countries through other people’s newspapers, and needs four years and many hands for it.
4. Information operations, data analysis, the sock puppet and the Fifty Cent Party (1990–2013) bring influence onto the net; every persona needs a person.
5. The Internet Research Agency, social bots, Kosinski’s profiles and Cambridge Analytica (2013–2018) turn it into an industry with precision; people still write the texts.
6. Coordinated inauthentic behaviour, laws, the Breakout Scale, prebunking, deepfakes and GPT-2 (2017–2022) bring rules, measure and countermeasures and the first machine that writes.
7. ChatGPT, the reports of the AI companies, Meliorator, Doppelganger and the annulment in Romania (2023–2024): the machine writes, the operations stay small, the effect in experiments is as great as that of state propaganda.
8. LLM grooming, agents that run accounts, studies in which models persuade better than people, and the first operations in categories 4 and 5 (since 2025): the machine acts; it is open who recognises who is speaking.

Timeline

Further reading

• Thomas Rid: Active Measures. The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2020. The history of disinformation from the 1920s to the Internet Research Agency, told from the files; sections 3 to 5.
• Paul M. A. Linebarger: Psychological Warfare. Infantry Journal Press, Washington 1948; 2nd edition 1954, free at Project Gutenberg. A practitioner’s textbook with the colours of propaganda; sections 2 and 3.
• Edward L. Bernays: Propaganda. Horace Liveright, New York 1928, free at Project Gutenberg. The programme of the influence industry, by the founder of public relations; section 1.
• Campbell Stuart: Secrets of Crewe House. The Story of a Famous Campaign. Hodder and Stoughton, London 1920, free at Project Gutenberg. The leaflet war of 1918 as seen by its makers; section 1.
• Sefton Delmer: Black Boomerang. Secker & Warburg, London 1962. The black stations, told by the man who invented them; section 2.
• Thomas Boghardt: Soviet Bloc Intelligence and Its AIDS Disinformation Campaign. In: Studies in Intelligence 53(4), 2009, free at the CIA. Operation INFEKTION station by station; section 3.
• Samuel C. Woolley, Philip N. Howard (eds.): Computational Propaganda. Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media. Oxford University Press, New York 2018. Nine countries, one term; section 5.
• Renée DiResta: Invisible Rulers. The People Who Turn Lies into Reality. PublicAffairs, New York 2024. How influence works on the net, by a researcher who investigated the Internet Research Agency for the Senate; sections 5 to 7.
• Josh A. Goldstein et al.: Generative Language Models and Automated Influence Operations. Emerging Threats and Potential Mitigations. Georgetown, OpenAI, Stanford 2023, free online. The prediction that the following years confirmed and refuted; section 7.
• Ben Nimmo: The Breakout Scale. Measuring the Impact of Influence Operations. Brookings Institution, Washington 2020, free online. The yardstick by which the industry counts; sections 6 to 8.

Sources

The chronicle is based on the original documents, court and government records, reports of the platforms and AI companies, scientific studies and contemporary reports named in the footnotes. Where only secondary sources were found, this is noted.