I really enjoyed Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality (2019). He pursues his subject across much of the globe, seeking out people who have shaped fractured information spaces in pursuit of their activist or political consulting goals. And he historicizes the development of contemporary information wars and ideological confusion by relating these phenomena to developments during and since the late Cold War.

He lends coherence to the sprawling tale by jumping around places and phenomena in an impressionistic style, using his father’s literary and radio biography as a reference point. The father was investigated by the KGB, which led to his family’s exile from the Soviet Union. The son later worked in Russian television for nearly a decade, gaining an insider’s view of Putin’s Russia that turned out to be more broadly relevant than he had initially realized (Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible [2014]).