The age of information (and knock-on misinformation) started around 1440. It's quantitatively easier these days, but the qualitative techniques remain recognisable. Remember the Maine!
Linebarger's Psychological Warfare (1948) has a history of tradecraft that goes back to biblical episodes.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm
flame wars in the seventeenth:
"The vocabulary of seventeenth-century propaganda had a strident tone which is, perhaps unfortunately, getting to be characteristic of the twentieth century. The following epithets sound like an American Legion description of Communists, or a Communist description of the Polish democrats, yet they were applied in a book by a Lutheran to Quakers. The title of the tirade reads, in part:
... a description of the ... new Quakers, making known the sum of their manifold blasphemous opinions, dangerous practices, Godless crimes, attempts to subvert civil government in the churches and in the community life of the world; together with their idiotic games, their laughable action and behavior, which is enough to make sober Christian persons breathless, and which is like death, and which can display the lazy stinking cadaver of their fanatical doctrines....
In its first few pages, the book accuses the Quakers of obscenity, adultery, civil commotion, conspiracy, blasphemy, subversion and lunacy. Milton was not out of fashion in applying bad manners to propaganda. It is merely regrettable that he did not transcend the frailties of his time."
(europe's wars of religion were both extremely polarising and far less effective at determining who was right than who was left.)