The unexpected change in the way media researchers frame the Internet – from a utopia of free speech in the 1990s to a nightmare of spreading propaganda and disinformation in the 2010s – is reminiscent of the founding period of the field in 1880–1920. It was then that, because of the birth of the modern cultural-industrial media system that was put into large-scale propaganda use by governments and other social actors, the foundations of propaganda studies were laid. This is why the work of Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) acquired new actuality. In