Introduction

The Introduction explains the origins of this volume in the author’s 2018 series of lectures on RussiaGate to faculty, student, and public audiences at universities in California, China, and Russia. The long history of the concept and practice of fake news is illustrated with reference to its deliberate use in contexts of election contests and preparations for war. The RussiaGate scandal of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential contest has brought to the fore many new dimensions to the methodologies of propaganda that can be identified through study of such phenomena as Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the former Cambridge Analytica and its parent company Strategic Communications Laboratory (SCL), the Institute of Statecraft (and its Integrity Initiative) and their exploitation of social media.