“This (the race to report on social media) has certainly revolutionised the weaponisation of information. In the 1980s, for example, the Soviet KGB ran Operation Denver, a complex attempt to present AIDS as a US biological weapon. To do this, they first had to plant the rumour in a pro-Soviet Indian newspaper they had set up twenty years earlier through front organisations. This published an anonymous letter, ostensibly from a ‘well-known American scientist’, in 1983. It didn’t get any real traction, so in 1985, an article citing the original Indian piece appeared in a heavyweight Soviet newspaper. The KGB roped in their Bulgarian and East German counterparts and the latter produced a pseudo-scientific report ‘confirming this story, ostensibly by a French researcher. Over the next few years, the myth would spread, but typically through stories planted in sympathetic (or sensationalist) newspapers abroad, magnified through the Soviet media, to try and simulate a groundswell of opinion. By 1992, reportedly some 15 per cent of Americans believed the virus was man-made.
That took years, a global network of agents, proxies and front organisations and a great deal of money and manpower. Compare that with a Chinese campaign in 2020. In mid-March, stung by accusations that poor food hygiene standards had led to COVID-19 and that it had concealed the initial outbreak, Beijing’s infowarriors began suggesting that it was actually again – a US bioweapon. Officials began tweeting and reposting accounts; conspiracy theory sites in the West gladly amplified it. So official spokespeople had to respond, and newspapers of record covered the story, even if only to dismiss it. Within days, the story had wormed itself into the global consciousness – and 29 per cent of Americans believed that the coronavirus had been cooked up in a lab outside China. Twice the result of Operation Denver, in days, not a decade.”
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