A few years ago, the US Army Cyber Institute stated that one of the biggest security threats came in the form of disinformation. So keen were they to press their point, they commissioned a graphic novel to outline the scenarios in which military capability and communication could be degraded by enemy disinformation. The idea was that everyone – particularly soldiers – would read a comic, while the serious messages on topics such as ‘microtargeting’ and ‘post truth’ were tucked away as articles between the pictures.

That’s how seriously Uncle Sam takes the Putin-approved troll farms pushing out disinformation about Western vaccines, social unrest and even elections, says Lee McIntyre in his latest extended essay on the topic. This propaganda is distributed to the more excitable of the American domestic media outlets who treat it as gospel, after which it finds its way into the echo chamber of social media, after which the military is powerless to do anything...