Modern propaganda and intelligence manipulation techniques have been made advanced, and well codified. But, they have been part of the human experience, any time we get populated and ordered well enough to have something we might call a civilization.

The info is surely manipulated, and poisoning data works much better than censoring it. Poisoning it makes it harder to discern truth vs falsehood, if you can't get hard evidence. They weren't dummies thousands of years ago, just a bit less sophisticated on these matters.