Vera Tolz presented a paper, "Viral" before the Internet: Home-Grown and Foreign AIDS Disinformation in the Late Cold War Western Anglophone Media, at the international workshop HIV/AIDS and the Boundaries of Europeanness (University of Manchester, 12 June 2026), examining how Soviet security services and Anglophone conspiracy theorists advanced competing yet structurally mirroring disinformation narratives about the laboratory origins of HIV/AIDS in the Cold War western anglophone media.
Rather than reflecting genuine evidential disputes, these claims are analysed as expressions of Cold War identity dynamics, in which the attribution of biological threat served to demarcate ideological boundaries and consolidate in-group belonging. The paper further draws parallels between the discursive and dissemination strategies employed by these actors during the late Cold War period and those observable in contemporary information environments, suggesting that the structural logic of "viral" disinformation long predates the digital networks through which it now travels.