propaganda today essay

Argument: Propaganda’s Progression

Create an FP account to save articles to read later.

ALREADY AN FP SUBSCRIBER? LOGIN

World Brief

• Editors’ Picks
• Africa Brief

China Brief

• Latin America Brief

South Asia Brief

Situation report.

• Flash Points
• War in Ukraine
• Israel and Hamas
• U.S.-China competition
• U.S. election 2024
• Biden's foreign policy
• Trade and economics
• Artificial intelligence
• Asia & the Pacific
• Middle East & Africa

How to Defend Europe

How platon photographs power, ones and tooze, foreign policy live.

Spring 2024 Issue

Print Archive

FP Analytics

• In-depth Special Reports
• Issue Briefs
• Power Maps and Interactive Microsites
• FP Simulations & PeaceGames
• Graphics Database

FP at NATO’s 75th Summit

Nato in a new era, fp security forum, fp @ unga79.

By submitting your email, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and to receive email correspondence from us. You may opt out at any time.

Your guide to the most important world stories of the day

Essential analysis of the stories shaping geopolitics on the continent

The latest news, analysis, and data from the country each week

Weekly update on what’s driving U.S. national security policy

Evening roundup with our editors’ favorite stories of the day

One-stop digest of politics, economics, and culture

Weekly update on developments in India and its neighbors

A curated selection of our very best long reads

Propaganda’s Progression

Over the years, misinformation campaigns have changed. here’s why the latest are so difficult to stamp out..

• United States

In the last few years, propaganda has taken on a new character, and the effects will reverberate far into the future. To understand how, it is worth looking at influences over time.

In World Wars I and II, propaganda was used to shape public opinion through print. Especially during the first war, books, newspapers, cartoons, slogans, theatre, and even postage stamps were common vehicles on both sides to promulgate favorable information. The propaganda kept publics on-side and boosted the ranks and morale of the armies . By the second World War, propaganda had changed, though, and movies in particular were used to incite fear. There were still the usual posters to mobilize soldiers, but they were negative rather than positive. “Stop this Monster that Stops at Nothing,” read one.

In 1947, a publisher in St. Paul, Minnesota released a red-scare comic book titled: “Is This Tomorrow; America Under Communism!” The animated cover displays the American flag engulfed in red flames as a backdrop of Black and white U.S. soldiers being brutally attacked by Communist soldiers. In this case, propaganda crossed racial lines to ensure that all Americans, regardless of color, could identify with the need to support and join soldiers in the fight against communism at all cost. It galvanized the public through symbolism and general personalities, like the soldier, in which all citizens respected and could relate to.

By the Cold War, propaganda mixed both methods: the promotion of ideologies and the demonization of personalities. In Cuba in 1956, the social revolution and propaganda strategy turned the collective consciousness of the Cuban people towards the personality of Fidel Castro . Castro was born to wealth but hated the elite, a welcome sentiment among those struggling for a decent living. Castro personally represented the struggle. Like other revolutionary leaders in history, i.e. Lenin and Trotsky, Mao, Haiti’s Louverture, Algeria’s Fanon, and the Mexican Emiliano Zapata, the U.S. propaganda used images and caricatures of Castro to demonize all that he stood for. However, the propaganda backfired, as Castro’s ideologies struck a chord with Black America in terms of injustice and socioeconomic inequality. Moreover, his appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1959 added an unexpected appeal as a victorious rebel with an attractive guerilla sidekick in Che Guevara. Ideological propaganda and the demonization of personalities as tools were losing ground. Citizens were beginning to use their own intelligence to determine what and who was to be avoided in foreign affairs.

The Arab Spring rebellions from 2010 to 2015 mark the boom in the use of the internet for propaganda . However, instead of strategic positioning by a war office, images and videos were posted by average citizens. Different than previous propaganda, the focus was on the populist struggle. People were tired of being oppressed by poverty and inequality, as exemplified by Mohamed Bouazizi, aged 26, who set himself on fire publicly in Tunisia as the ultimate protest against poverty . Following his act, which spurred the rebellions, citizens took the promotion of propaganda into their own hands through social media. As such, the propaganda of the Arab Spring movement intended to communicate inequities and the rise of populism.

On the heels of the Arab Spring came the rise of the Islamic State, and with it another iteration of propaganda, this one with a clear vision to stamp out Western values with Islam. A major shift in vehicles for promotion differentiates this propaganda from all past years. The dawn of social media with worldwide access became the primary propaganda tool for the Islamic State. Platforms like Facebook and YouTube were used to send highly effective videos, both taped and real-time, that infiltrate the psyche visually, auditorily, and intellectually. This level of propaganda serves as a cognitive manipulation , often not recognized until one is faced with dire consequences from nefarious actions, or until there is a change in one’s own identity . More effective than posters, stamps, and movies with hired actors, cyber-propaganda is today’s most dangerous form of guerilla warfare.

Russia’s cyber-propaganda in the United States over the past four years has helped to divide the country ideologically to the point of an insurrection by radical Trump supporters. Indeed, its misinformation, promoted easily through social media in the form of advertisements, YouTube videos, and Twitter chats has stoked hate and conspiracy theories. This reaches millions of Americans.

As it relates to revolutionary movements, the author Jeff Goodwin offers a fundamental reason as to why small numbers of rebels can be successful in their missions: “One possible explanation is that insurgencies that are ‘racial’ or ethnic in nature as well as rooted in class or socioeconomic grievances are likely to be particularly intractable, whereas rebellions that are merely class-based will be easily defeated or co-opted.” Russian propaganda in the United States included messages that preyed upon multiple ideological differences within the fabric of the nation. They promoted messages of fear about losing jobs to immigrants, and Second Amendment rights being stripped. They pushed misinformation about federal overreach, and the need for more policing to stop crime.

Given real problems that underlie those messages—the economic decline of white people in states that in the past profited from the free labor of Black slaves , coupled with a new industrial revolution that left their industries behind—and you’ve got a high likelihood that Trump supporters will continue to mobilize. Russia use of the age-old power of propaganda might have set the scene for the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, but quelling the intra-state discord is up to America.

Angela R. Pashayan is a Ph.D. student in political science at Howard University.

The Capitol Coup Attempt Was the Far-Right’s Opening Shot

Jan. 6 was a classic example of propaganda by the deed—a revolutionary approach favored by everyone from 19th-century anarchists to Osama bin Laden.

What Can Insurance Tell Us About the Capitol Mob?

And how Biden can use economic theory to stave off more riots.

The Capitol Invasion Was a Coup From Below

Trump borrowed from the playbook of his favorite dictator, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, by inciting a mob to launch an insurrection.

Sign up for Editors' Picks

A curated selection of fp’s must-read stories..

You’re on the list! More ways to stay updated on global news:

What to Know as France Goes to the Polls

Revisiting chinese empire, the world still needs habermas, the greatest generation had queer veterans, too, an atrevida is best avoided, editors’ picks.

• 1 Trump’s Return Would Transform Europe
• 2 Why Are French Jews Supporting the Far Right?
• 3 The Deep Roots of Kenya’s Unrest
• 4 The West Misunderstands Its Own Far Right
• 5 What Would a Far-Right Victory Mean for French Foreign Policy?
• 6 Against China, the United States Must Play to Win

France Election: What to Know as the Country Votes

Review: 'at the edge of empire: a family's reckoning with china', habermas was the liberal philosopher of his era of european history—but not ours, biden's pardon is a reminder the greatest generation had queer veterans, too, what the word atrevida reveals about portugal's floundering #metoo movement, more from foreign policy, nato’s new leader was planning this the whole time.

Mark Rutte, a workaholic obsessed with routine, is about to take over the West’s military alliance.

What the United States Can Learn From China

Amid China’s rise, Americans should ask what Beijing is doing right—and what they’re doing wrong.

What a War Between Israel and Hezbollah Might Look Like

The Lebanese armed group is trained and equipped much better than Hamas.

The Hidden Critique of U.S. Foreign Policy in ‘Red Dawn’

Forty years ago, Hollywood released a hit movie with a surprisingly subversive message.

What Would a Far-Right Victory Mean for French Foreign Policy?

Trump’s return would transform europe, key foreign-policy moments from the trump-biden debate, why are french jews supporting the far right, the west misunderstands its own far right.

Sign up for World Brief

FP’s flagship evening newsletter guiding you through the most important world stories of the day, written by Alexandra Sharp . Delivered weekdays.

We are all propagandists now

Professor of Communication, Texas A&M University

Disclosure statement

Jennifer Mercieca does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Texas A&M University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation US.

View all partners

The U.S. is in an information war with itself. The public sphere, where Americans discuss public issues, is broken . There’s little discussion – and lots of fighting.

One reason why: Persuasion is difficult, slow and time-consuming – it doesn’t make good television or social media content – and so there aren’t a lot of good examples of it in our public discourse.

What’s worse, a new form of propaganda has emerged – and it’s enlisted us all as propagandists.

Persuasion versus propaganda

I teach classes on political communication and propaganda in America. Here’s the difference between the two:

Political communication is persuasion used in politics. It helps to facilitate the democratic process.

Propaganda is communication as force; it’s designed for warfare. Propaganda is anti-democratic because it influences while using strategies like fear appeals, disinformation, conspiracy theory and more.

Since there are few examples of persuasion in our public sphere these days, it is difficult to know the difference between persuasion and propaganda. That’s worrisome because politics is not war, so political communication isn’t – and shouldn’t be – the same as propaganda.

The manufacture of consent

Mass propaganda techniques emerged with mass communication technologies like posters , pictures and movies during the first World War.

That old propaganda model was designed by political elites to “ manufacture consent ” at home so that citizens would support the war, and to demoralize the enemy abroad.

According to linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky , the manufacture of consent was believed by elites to be necessary because they thought “the mass of the public are just too stupid to be able to understand things…We have to tame the bewildered herd, not allow the bewildered herd to rage and trample and destroy things.”

During World War I, George Creel’s Committee on Public Information , a federal agency, oversaw the production of pro-war films like the 1918 silent film “ America’s Answer .” When Americans went to see the film in theaters, they would often encounter a speech from one of the “ Four Minute Men ” – the local citizens whom Creel enlisted to give patriotic speeches during the four minutes it took to change the movie reels.

After World War I, according to Herman and Chomsky , all sorts of elites turned to propaganda to “tame the bewildered herd.” The old propaganda was good at taming citizens. But there was a nasty side effect that played out over almost a century of its use: disengagement. Political communication scholars in the 1990s and early 2000s worried about what they saw as the crisis in democracy, which was civic disengagement characterized by low voter turnout, low political party affiliation and rising distrust, cynicism and disinterest in politics.

The manufacture of dissent

The elite-controlled old vertical propaganda model couldn’t withstand the changes in communication brought on by the new participatory media – first talk radio, then cable, email, blogs, chats, texts, video and social media.

According to recent Pew research, 93% of Americans are connected to the internet and 82% of Americans are connected to social media . We now all have direct access to communicate in the public sphere – and, if we choose, to create, circulate and amplify propaganda.

A lot of people use their social media connections and platforms to knowingly and unknowingly spread misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy and partisan talking points – all forms of propaganda. We’re all propagandists now.

Rather than the elite manufacturing consent, a new propaganda model has emerged in the 21st century: what I call the “manufacture of dissent.”

New crisis in democracy

The “manufacture of dissent” model takes advantage of our individual abilities to produce, circulate and amplify propaganda. It sets us in motion to, in Chomsky’s words, “rage and trample and destroy things.”

The new propaganda can emerge from anyone, anywhere – and it is designed to create chaos so no one knows whom to trust or what is true.

Now we have a new crisis in democracy.

Citizens are called upon and trained by political parties, media, advocacy organizations, platforms, corporations – and more – to become propagandists, even without realizing it. Though both sides of the political spectrum can and have used the new propaganda, it has been embraced more on the right, largely to counter the old manufacture of consent model embraced by the mainstream.

For example, the slogan topping daily emails sent by ConservativeHQ , a longstanding and influential conservative news blog, says, “The home for grassroots conservatives leading the battle to educate and mobilize family, friends, neighbors, and others to defeat the anti-God, anti-America, Marxist New Democrats.”

From this perspective, politics is a “battle,” it’s warfare and ConservativeHQ’s readers can fight by educating and mobilizing – by spreading ConservativeHQ’s propaganda.

Likewise, the conspiracy website InfoWars tells its audience “there’s a war on for your mind.”

Social media platforms train users to communicate as propagandists: Recent research shows that platform users learn to express polarizing emotions like outrage through “social learning.” Social media users are taught through app feedback – positive reinforcement through notifications – and peer-learning – what they see others do – to post outrage even if they don’t feel outraged and they don’t want to spread outrage.

The more outrage we see, the more outrage we post.

Dissent and distrust

Today’s new model of propaganda has dangerous consequences.

The Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection was a direct result of the manufacture of dissent. Right-wing politicians, citizens and media used disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy, fear appeals and outrage circulated via the old and new propaganda to cast doubt on the nation’s electoral process.

President Trump primed his followers to believe that the election would be “ rigged ,” which led people to look for and circulate so-called “evidence ” of fraud.

Courts and election officials certified the integrity of the election . Conspiracists saw that as further evidence of the “plot” and supported Trump’s Big Lie that the election had been stolen.

Trump’s supporters amplified the conspiracy via posts on social media, videos, text messages, emails and secret groups – spreading doubt about the election to their friends, neighbors and audiences.

When Trump told people to march on the Capitol to defend their freedom, they did.

Politics is war

But the Big Lie that led to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection was merely part of an even bigger lie.

Since the 1990s and the emergence of the manufacture of dissent, right-wing propaganda’s major premise has been that “politics is war and the enemy cheats.” Every news story from that perspective is an elaboration on that theme, including those about the 2020 election.

When politics is seen as war and the enemy can’t be trusted, then every election is seen as dire and the electoral process that denies your side victory is seen as unfair. According to a recent Monmouth University poll , 30% of Americans still believe Trump’s Big Lie.

The legitimacy of the American political system requires the actual consent of the governed, and its vitality and health requires we allow actual dissent. But our broken public sphere has neither.

Both come from persuasion, not propaganda.

This isn’t about nostalgia for traditional propaganda. Both the old propaganda and the new propaganda are anti-democratic. The old propaganda manufactured Americans’ consent, using communication as force to keep people disengaged and compliant.

The new propaganda manufactures dissent. It uses communication as force to keep people engaged and outraged – and it sets us in motion to trample and destroy things.

[ The Conversation’s most important politics headlines, in our Politics Weekly newsletter . ]

• Social media
• Noam Chomsky
• Political communication
• Donald Trump

PhD Scholarship

Senior Lecturer, HRM or People Analytics

Senior Research Fellow - Neuromuscular Disorders and Gait Analysis

Centre Director, Transformative Media Technologies

Postdoctoral Research Fellowship

Presentations made painless

• Get Premium

127 Propaganda Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Propaganda has been used throughout history as a powerful tool to manipulate and influence public opinion. From political campaigns to advertising, propaganda can be found in various forms and mediums. If you are interested in exploring this topic further, here are 127 propaganda essay topic ideas and examples to get you started.

• The use of propaganda in World War II
• How propaganda influenced the outcome of the Cold War
• Analyzing propaganda in contemporary political campaigns
• The role of propaganda in shaping public opinion on climate change
• The impact of social media on modern propaganda
• Propaganda in advertising: how brands manipulate consumer behavior
• The ethics of propaganda in journalism
• Propaganda in film and television: analyzing its use in popular culture
• The psychological effects of propaganda on individuals
• Propaganda in education: how textbooks shape students' beliefs
• The role of propaganda in promoting nationalism
• Analyzing propaganda in historical speeches
• The use of propaganda in promoting healthcare initiatives
• Propaganda in the music industry: how artists promote their image
• The role of propaganda in promoting social justice movements
• How propaganda is used to justify war and conflict
• Analyzing propaganda in religious texts
• The impact of propaganda on public health campaigns
• Propaganda in sports: how athletes promote themselves and their sponsors
• The role of propaganda in shaping public policy
• Analyzing propaganda in political cartoons
• The use of propaganda in promoting tourism
• How propaganda is used to promote consumerism
• Propaganda in the fashion industry: how brands influence trends
• The role of propaganda in promoting diet and fitness fads
• Analyzing propaganda in celebrity endorsements
• The impact of propaganda on public perceptions of crime and justice
• Propaganda in historical monuments and memorials
• How propaganda is used to promote cultural stereotypes
• The role of propaganda in promoting social media influencers
• Analyzing propaganda in video games
• The use of propaganda in promoting military recruitment
• Propaganda in historical artwork and literature
• How propaganda is used to promote religious beliefs
• The role of propaganda in promoting conspiracy theories
• Analyzing propaganda in public health crises
• The impact of propaganda on public perceptions of immigration

These essay topic ideas and examples provide a wide range of options for exploring the fascinating world of propaganda. Whether you are interested in historical propaganda campaigns or modern-day examples in advertising and social media, there is plenty to explore and analyze in this complex and influential field. Happy writing!

Want to create a presentation now?

Instantly Create A Deck

Let PitchGrade do this for me

Hassle Free

We will create your text and designs for you. Sit back and relax while we do the work.

Explore More Content

• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service

© 2023 Pitchgrade

It’s Not Misinformation. It’s Amplified Propaganda.

You don’t need fake accounts to spread ampliganda online. Real people will happily do it.

Updated at 12:10 p.m. ET on October 11, 2021

O ne Sunday morning in July of last year, a message from an anonymous account appeared on “Bernie or Vest,” a Discord chat server for fans of Senator Bernie Sanders. It contained an image of Shahid Buttar, the San Francisco activist challenging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the 2020 congressional runoff, and offered explicit instructions for how to elevate the hashtag #PelosiMustGo to the nationwide Trending list on Twitter. “Shahid Says…,” read the large print, “Draft some tweets with #PelosiMustGo—don’t forget to capitalize #EachWord. Don’t use more than two hashtags—otherwise you’ll be marked as spam.” The call to action urged people to start posting at noon Pacific time, attach their favorite graphics, and like and retweet other Buttar supporters’ contributions.

I was living in San Francisco then and had been following Buttar’s efforts to get attention, as traditional outlets largely ignored the democratic socialist’s underdog campaign. The day before, incensed at Pelosi’s refusal to debate him, he had sparred with an unoccupied chair outdoors on a public street. But on Twitter that Sunday morning, the challenger had a more promising strategy: If the ploy worked, his slogan would show up on millions of screens across the entire country without costing him a dime. Team Buttar’s message was sent at 10:30 a.m. I wondered whether the online armies would turn out for him. “Did you see this?” I asked a colleague at the Stanford Internet Observatory over Slack, dropping the anonymous call to action into the channel. Then I made a pot of coffee and waited to see whether Buttar’s supporters could pull it off.

Through my work at the Internet Observatory, I’d witnessed many attempts to push messages by gaming the algorithms that Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms use to identify popular content and surface it to users. Confronted with campaigns to make certain ideas seem more widespread than they really are, many researchers and media commentators have taken to using labels such as “misinformation” and “disinformation.” But those terms have fallen victim to scope creep. They imply that a narrative or claim has deviated from a stable or canonical truth; whether Pelosi should go is simply a matter of opinion.

Read: The Nancy Pelosi problem

In fact, we have a very old word for persuasive communication with an agenda: propaganda . That term, however, comes with historical baggage. It presumes that governments, authority figures, institutions, and mass media are forcing ideas on regular people from the top down. But more and more, the opposite is happening. Far from being merely a target, the public has become an active participant in creating and selectively amplifying narratives that shape realities. Perhaps the best word for this emergent bottom-up dynamic is one that doesn’t exist quite yet: ampliganda , the shaping of perception through amplification . It can originate from an online nobody or an onscreen celebrity. No single person or organization bears responsibility for its transmission. And it is having a profound effect on democracy and society.

Buttar’s #PelosiMustGo was both typical and unusual. Hashtag campaigns occur all the time, but I happened to catch this one right at the start. First, it was a blip in a corner of the internet, but the hashtag soon lit up the modern propaganda system. This amplification chain is incredibly powerful; it surfaces civil-rights violations, protest movements, and breaking events, whether traditional media choose to cover those events or not. But it’s also how quack medical claims and a daily parade of conspiracy theories are made to trend—#Ivermectin, #SaveTheChildren , #StopTheSteal.

Buttar had two key prerequisites for creating a viral moment: an Extremely Online supporter base experienced in Twitter conflict, and a hashtag slogan expressing righteous indignation. At 11:57 a.m., a Twitter user who went by @Pondipper and had a modest 1,700 followers, jumped the gun: #PelosiMustGo. Tweet No. 1. Buttar himself posted promptly at noon: “Why do you think #PelosiMustGo?” he asked his 113,000 followers. The tweet inspired several hundred replies and retweets, some encouraging him, others questioning him, others mocking him. But anyone who engaged with Buttar’s post—whether to applaud it or scorn it—was telling Twitter algorithms to elevate it. My coffee cooled as the hashtag moved up Twitter’s rankings and began elbowing aside trends about AR-15s, golf, Donald Trump’s pardons, and then–Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

In the previous few years, taking advantage of features like trending lists had become more challenging as social-media companies had gotten wise to the manipulation. By 2018, Twitter had already begun to discount postings from bot and sock-puppet accounts when determining which subjects were becoming popular. Facebook had kicked an infamous Russian troll factory off the platform, and then established integrity teams to look for “coordinated inauthentic behavior”—that is, suspicious activity by networks of accounts that, in many cases, consisted of fake personas. For tech platforms, cracking down on fake accounts, bot networks, and institutional trolls was easy to justify; the general public didn’t much care about the free-speech rights of fake people. But the rewards for successfully capturing public attention were still huge enough to keep authentic actors looking for creative ways to propel their message to the top of Twitter’s popularity charts. More and more, I noticed, ordinary people had been stepping up to spread messages that, in the past, might have been amplified by bots.

As #PelosiMustGo reached No. 7 on the Trending list, the former GOP congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero discovered Buttar’s hashtag and tweeted it to her own 330,000 followers . She and Buttar disagreed on nearly everything—except that #PelosiMustGo. Within three minutes, the hashtag began rippling through the conservative Twitterverse, where regular people utterly unaware of the coordinated effort on the left began tweeting alongside Tesoriero. A second faction had entered the campaign! The conspiracy brokers of QAnon quickly got in the game, appending #PelosiMustGo to posts about the addled theory they happened to be pushing that morning (that the online furniture retailer Wayfair was trafficking children ). Pelosi’s own fans followed closely behind, trying to reframe the hashtag: #PelosiMustGo “straight to the White House and take over the presidency!” But by contributing, they only amplified the messages of ideological enemies on the House speaker’s right and left.

If Buttar were a Russian troll, the #PelosiMustGo triumph might have earned him a promotion: Americans were yet again feuding on social media. But Buttar is very much an American, and so were the overwhelming majority of the online activists whom he exhorted to join his campaign. Although it is tempting to believe that foreign bogeymen are sowing discord, the reality is far simpler and more tragic: Outrage generates engagement, which algorithmically begets more engagement, and even those who don’t want to shred the fabric of American society are nonetheless encouraged to play by these rules in their effort to call attention to their cause. When I asked Buttar about the hashtag campaign recently, he told me that he’d chosen #PelosiMustGo because it had the potential to attract attention from a variety of communities. “Foundationally, the challenge is that I talk about all kinds of things—most of what I talk about are solutions to problems—but those posts don’t go viral,” Buttar said. His campaign had built direct-messaging groups of supporters “who were enthusiastic about coordinating across the broader movement,” he recalled, “and I thought of that network and its messaging and capacity as a sort of counterpropaganda, a way to help break through to the public because so many stories never get covered.”

Some ampliganda takes off because an influential user gets an ideologically aligned crowd of followers to spread it; in other cases, an idea spontaneously emerges from somewhere in the online crowd, fellow travelers give it an initial boost, and the influencer sees the emergent action and amplifies it, precipitating a cascade of action from adjacent factions. Most Twitter users never knew that #PelosiMustGo began because someone gave marching orders in a private Discord channel. They saw only the hashtag. They likely assumed that somewhere, some sizable portion of Americans were spontaneously tweeting against the speaker of the House. And they were right—sort of.

I n 1622, the same year that Galileo was reiterating his defense of the heliocentric model of the solar system, Pope Gregory XV created the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith—known in Latin as the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, or the Propaganda Fide for short—a body tasked with coordinating and expanding the missionary activity of the Catholic Church.

The Church was in crisis. The Protestant Reformation, kicked off just more than a century earlier, had divided the European continent into competing factions. The English and Dutch were spreading Protestantism to far-flung colonies in Asia and the Americas, while the printing press and rising literacy rates had shattered the Church’s monopoly on the divine word. The Propaganda Fide was intended to stem the losses, to draw waverers back to the one true faith.

The word propaganda is a form of a Latin verb, one that Gregory likely chose “to add to the sense of a religious Crusade,” Maria Teresa Prendergast and Thomas Prendergast write in the Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies. The term referred less to what Church representatives said than what they did ; propaganda described their fervid mission to disseminate the Church’s view far and wide.

Renee DiResta: The supply of disinformation will soon be infinite

Over the subsequent centuries, propaganda gradually acquired a secular meaning—information with an agenda, deliberately created to shape the audience’s perception of reality. The term also took on an antidemocratic connotation: Propaganda’s intent was to circumvent a citizen’s reason, to propel him via deceit or chicanery toward belief in a particular cause. Historically, many Americans have been loath to admit either spreading or falling for such material. During the two world wars, propaganda was what the Germans did; in the Cold War era, conservatives in the United States feared Communist domination of the media.

Yet the notion that the powerful could manipulate the masses from the top down took hold on the left as well. At the zenith of mass media, television networks and radio stations communicated unidirectionally to the public. The linguist, philosopher, and social critic Noam Chomsky argued in a 1988 book that the U.S. government was “manufacturing consent” for its policies with the help of complicit news outlets, whose economic incentives and ties to elites led them to abdicate their responsibility to inform the public. This line of reasoning gradually took on a conspiratorial undertone among its most sympathetic audiences: They are trying to control us .

Since then, social media has ended the monopoly of mass-media propaganda. But it has also ushered in a new competitor: ampliganda—the result of a system in which trust has been reallocated from authority figures and legacy media to charismatic individuals adept at appealing to the aspects of personal or ideological identity that their audiences hold most dear.

O f all the changes wrought by social networks, this ability of online crowds to influence one another is among the most important and underappreciated. In a postmortem analysis of the 2016 election, Harvard’s Yochai Benkler described a “ propaganda pipeline ” whereby marginal actors on such social-media sites as Reddit and 4chan pass stories to online influencers, who in turn draw the attention of traditional media. Another scholar, Alicia Wanless, applied the term participatory propaganda , and Jennifer Mercieca, a rhetoric professor at Texas A&M, recently insisted, “ We are all propagandists now .” The old top-down propaganda model has begun to erode, but the bottom-up version may be even more destructive.

Today there is simply a rhetorical war of all against all: a maelstrom of viral hashtags competing for attention, hopping from community to community, amplified by crowds of true believers for whom sharing and retweeting is akin to a religious calling—even if the narrative they’re propagating is a ludicrous conspiracy theory about stolen ballots or Wayfair-trafficked children. Ampliganda engenders a constellation of mutually reinforcing arguments targeted at, and internalized by, niche communities, rather than a single, monolithic narrative fed to the full citizenry. It has facilitated a fragmentation of reality with profound implications. Each individual act of clicking or resharing may not feel like a propagandistic act, but in the aggregate, those acts shape conversations, beliefs, realities.

Although we are all partly responsible , we are not all equally responsible. On my computer screen, the spiderlike network graph of Buttar’s hashtag began thickening its web among a new set of users, a disproportionate number of whom had American-flag emoji in their bios and MAGA hats in their profile photos. Jack Posobiec had tweeted about #PelosiMustGo.

Peter Wehner: You’re being manipulated

Frequently seen sporting a close-cropped beard and a sharply pressed blazer, Posobiec is a former U.S. military-intelligence analyst. His work today is altogether more difficult to categorize. In 2017, Posobiec described it to The New York Times as “part investigative, part activist, part commentary.” Posobiec is notorious for peddling Pizzagate and other groundless, inflammatory conspiracy theories to his 1.3 million Twitter followers. He is an influencer—someone who is famous on social media mostly for being famous on social media. The influencer is an authentic figure in a chaotic online world, opining about topics as disparate as armed conflicts and laundry detergents. Whereas expertise is conferred by the academy and celebrity is conferred from the outside by recognized media outlets, influencers can rise without the validation of gatekeepers—a selling point in an era of anti-elite sensibilities. Conservative influencers promote themselves as ordinary people who defy conniving liberals and the lying mainstream media. Most of these personalities generate attention and, yes, advertising revenue from their adulatory audiences. This is their business; on the left, a separate group of hyperpartisan influencers are running their own grift.

The crowd, meanwhile, is motivated by ideology, but also the camaraderie of participation and the potential for recognition ; in their Twitter bios, many of the most committed online factionalists list influencer luminaries who have retweeted them. Once disparagingly called “slacktivism,” clicks and shares in service to a cause have evolved into a source of meaning for many, and what happens online doesn’t stay online.

Jack Posobiec’s tweet about #PelosiMustGo, posted 45 minutes after Buttar’s, was a banal observation: “#PelosiMustGo is now #6 trending,” was all he said. But it was enough; his followers knew their cues. They liked the message 16,000 times and replied or retweeted thousands more, propelling the hashtag fully into the national political conversation. Shortly after, on my screen, the trend hit No. 1.

Five hours after the campaign began, as the sun dipped lower over the San Francisco hills, more than 100,000 tweets had been posted. An ad hoc coalition of socialists, conservatives, influencers, liberals, QAnon supporters, and others had gathered together on the internet for an afternoon of fragmentary and cacophonous micro-discussions about whether #PelosiMustGo. The public’s attention would soon shift elsewhere. The ultimate victory, of course, would be Pelosi’s; she remains the speaker of the House. But for the moment, a politician and a little more than 100 blue-check Twitter accounts had moved in concert with tens of thousands of other users to call the public’s attention to California’s Twelfth District, where Shahid Buttar—socialist, activist, and intersectional feminist—was campaigning to unseat Nancy Pelosi, then the most powerful Democrat in America.

In my conversation with Buttar, he sounded struck not only by the power of the various networks to break through and capture public attention, but also by the unpredictability of how #PelosiMustGo spread. “We didn’t have any control over it,” he said several times, referring to the hashtag once it was unleashed as much as to the behavior of the digital crowds themselves. “We built a pretty big wave, and I was glad to surf it for a while,” he said, until others “with a bigger board pushed me off the wave.” He added, “I remembered thinking as it was happening, Wow, our supporters can build waves like this?! But it wasn’t just our supporters; it was a bunch of other waves in confluence, building on each other.”

America’s political and civic norms have not adjusted to these conditions. We are surrounded at all times by urgency, by demands to take action. We may not be entirely sure why something popped up in our feed, but that doesn’t obviate the nagging feeling that we should pay attention. Understanding the incentives of influencers, recognizing the very common rhetorical techniques that precipitate outrage, developing an awareness of how online crowds now participate in crystallizing public opinion—that is an education that Americans need. Regulators and members of Congress are attempting to sort out which guardrails our communication infrastructure might require, and the platforms that designed the architecture incessantly amend their policies in response to the latest media exposé of unintended consequences. In the short term, each of us becomes more aware of what we choose to amplify, and how we choose to participate. To adapt to the new propaganda, the public must first learn to recognize it.

I closed my laptop as #PelosiMustGo began to fall off the Twitter leaderboards. The next day, there would be new hashtags to track. Whether organic or contrived, they would be amplified by factions, curated and pushed out to the public by algorithms that reward engagement with yet more engagement. A giant web of interconnected users, each with an agenda, shouting at one another to pay attention. It’s not disinformation. Our politics is awash in ampliganda, the propaganda of the modern age.

This article previously misstated Yochai Benkler’s affiliation.

The Effects of Participatory Propaganda: From Socialization to Internalization of Conflicts

A look at how propaganda has been rewired for the digital age and how this new, “participatory propaganda” mediates conflict, manipulates relationships and creates isolation, both online and offline.

In this essay, Gregory Asmolov, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at King’s College London and a scholar noted for his work understanding the Russian Internet (Runet), examines a new set of propaganda strategies emerging on social networks in Ukraine and Russia. He takes us on a conceptual journey from understanding how traditional propaganda has been “rewired” for the digital age to examining its methodologies and impact today. This new phenomenon of "participatory propaganda" seeks not only to persuade users to interpret events through a particular lens, but also to manipulate relationships, dividing friends, breaking alliances and leaving individuals isolated and tractable, online and offline.

— Ethan Zuckerman, Editor

Propaganda is no longer just a tool for changing your opinion. Now, in our digitally mediated world, propaganda is a pathway to instantaneous participation in political conflicts from the safety and comfort of your living room chair. It is also, ironically, now a tool for instantaneously breaking connections between friends and relatives whose opinions differ. Participatory propaganda helps to socialize conflicts and make them part of everyday life. This increasing scope of engagement can also lead to an internalization of conflict, which means that instead of encouraging you to filter alternative sources of information, participatory propaganda aims to reshape your cognitive filters as well as the relationship between you and your environment. 1

Introduction: Back in the USSR

It is October of 1986. I am one of 25 children in the pre-school group of a kindergarten in the Leninsky district of Moscow. It is the “quiet hour” in the middle of the day when children are supposed to nap, but I cannot sleep. I am very worried. Every evening, after the “Spokoynoy Nochi, Malyshi” (Goodnight, Kids) children’s show on television at 8:45 pm, I watch the evening news program “Vremya” (Time). Last evening I heard that our leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, is going to meet the American leader, Ronald Reagan, in Reykjavík. I cannot understand why Gorbachev is going there. I am sure the Americans are going to kill him. I am also sleepless because I am afraid of nuclear war. At this time “Star Wars” for me is not a movie, but a plan for American military aggression against the people of the Soviet Union.

So my parents offered me a new game. They gave me an old radio and taught me how to search for short-wave radio stations. Unlike our TV, which had only six buttons for six channels, the radio offered a range of voices in different languages. The purpose of the game was to scan the short waves and find Russian-speaking stations broadcasting from beyond the borders of the USSR; the so-called “Vrazheskie golosa” (Enemy Voices). It was quite tricky, since the tiniest movements of my fingers would sweep past these stations, and their wavelengths sometimes changed in order to avoid being jammed by the Soviet government.

I learned very quickly how to recognize Radio Freedom, the Voice of Israel, the Voice of America and the BBC. (Who could imagine that 30 years later I would have an office in Bush House, where the BBC Russian Service was broadcasting from at that time, and is now part of King’s College London!) I really enjoyed my parents’ new game. For the first time in my life, I was actively involved in searching for news. I also started to sleep better during the “quiet hour” at kindergarten. Through that radio game I learned that the same events can be described in very different ways. Although I wasn’t able to understand many things, it highlighted the polyphony of voices and framings. I was lucky to have this experience just then, in 1986. Only a year later, “glasnost,” a new policy of media openness, began to influence Soviet TV, and the “enemy voices” lost their unique value as a window onto an alternative reality.

The image of me as a child sitting in my bedroom in front of the radio and searching for “enemy voices” comes back as I think about how the Internet has changed propaganda. In 1986 that old short-wave radio was a physical mediator between me as a user and the global environment. It brought new meanings directly into my bedroom. I didn’t know that what I heard was called “anti-Soviet propaganda.” Similarly, I hadn’t known that the news I watched on TV was propaganda, either. What really mattered was the range of voices brought to me by these various tools of mediation.

Today, with the Internet, it is much easier to find alternative sources. The quality of information is often good, and there is no need for tiny movements of the fingers, although instead of the Soviet-style “glushilki” (jammers), we have new technologies like packet filtering and state-sponsored censorship. These days, however, it seems that even a huge diversity of voices still does not help to challenge propaganda or increase critical thinking. One could suggest that, in order to address this puzzle, we need to focus not on the content of propaganda, but on its delivery, and to ask how the new technological tools used for the proliferation of propaganda change the relationship between users and their environment.

The Affordances of “Rewired Propaganda”: A Mediational Perspective

The comparison between a television set picking up six broadcast channels and a short-wave radio picking up hundreds highlights the difference between closed and open artifacts mediating the relationship between subjects and their environment. “Closed” artifacts transfer only limited streams of information, both in terms of the number of channels and of the scope of sources that can be covered by those channels. “Open” artifacts offer a window onto a limitless world of sources and an unrestricted number of channels. Propaganda has always been more at home in an isolated environment, where it need not compete with alternative sources and where it has a monopoly over shaping the perception of the audience. Counter-propaganda, in its turn, has tried to break this monopoly and find a way through the “curtain” of isolation, either by distributing printed matter (for example, dropping leaflets from the air) or by using radio, whose signal waves are notoriously unimpressed by national borders.

The emergence of the Internet, however, challenged the capacity of state actors to isolate any environment from external information. Some countries, such as North Korea and Turkmenistan, disconnected their local Internet from the global infrastructure in order to maintain that isolation. Others introduced advanced mode of filtering such as what we now know as the “Great Firewall of China.” Russia chose a different path. From the outset, the Russian Internet, also known as Runet, developed as an independent space. Its development has been driven by imaginaries of alternative cultural, social, and political environments beyond the control of traditional political institutions (Asmolov & Kolozaridi, 2017). “The online sphere challenges how the Russian state has traditionally dominated the information heights via television” (Oates, 2016). This, however, sparked a new type of propaganda that would be effective despite the lack of state control over the information environment. This new type of propaganda, described by Sarah Oates as “rewired propaganda,” seeks to neutralize the Internet’s capacity to undermine authority and challenge the narratives of the state. In Oates’s formulation, “a commitment to disinformation and manipulation, when coupled with the affordances of the new digital age, gives particular advantages to a repressive regime that can pro-actively shape the media narrative.”

Rewired propaganda uses some traditional tools of Internet control, like filtering and censorship. But its novelty lies in its preference for more innovative models of propaganda, including sophisticated manipulation of information and computational propaganda (Wooley & Howard, 2016; Sanovich, 2017). Computational propaganda, in particular, relies on affordances that allow fake identities to be created by mutually reinforcing human and non-human agents, including disinformation agents and bots. For example, a believable inauthentic voice is created by an individual, then amplified by bots. These actors not only distribute content but also increase the visibility of information. They may also change the structure of discourse and increase its emotional sentiment. Human image synthesis technologies, which rely on AI and machine learning, provide the means to fabricate evidence, including “deep fakes” where the line between what appears to be genuine and what is not has been eliminated (Edwards, S. & S. Livingston, 2018). Less sophisticated tools for content editing allow these actors to create “shallow fakes” in which an image is recontextualized, or simply misrepresented (Johnson, 2019).

Defining Propaganda

Before we go deeper into our discussion of propaganda, we must first define what it is. One of the classical definitions of propaganda is “the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols” (Laswell, 1927). A more detailed definition states that “Propaganda is the expression of opinions or actions carried out deliberately by individuals or groups with a view to influencing the opinions or actions of other individuals or groups for predetermined ends and through psychological manipulations” (the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1937/1972). Yet another describes propaganda as “Communication designed to manipulate a target population by affecting its beliefs, attitudes, or preferences in order to obtain behaviour compliant with political goals of the propagandist” (Benkler et. al., 2018). One may also argue that propaganda often incorporates the voice of the state and is driven by the interests of institutional hegemonic actors.

Three elements are central to these definitions: Propaganda is intentional; it relies on manipulation, specifically through the use of misleading information; and its purpose is to support political goals by drawing out and managing behavior. The challenge, however, is to define what elements within propagandist messaging are misleading or manipulative. Addressing these questions is particularly challenging in the context of conflicts. What is considered propaganda by one side of the conflict would be treated by the other side as the legitimate “presentation of a case in such a way that others may be influenced” (Stuart, 1920) and dissemination of information for a justified cause. It is considerably challenging to “coherently distinguish ‘propaganda’ from a variety of other terms that refer to communication to a population that has a similar desired outcome: persuasion, marketing, public relations, and education” (Benkler et al., 2018).

In order to address some of these challenges, I focus my attention in this essay on one particular aspect of propaganda: its role in the mobilization of individuals and groups. Gustave Le Bon in 1903 was among the first to consider propaganda as a way to shape the opinions and beliefs of crowds in order to move those crowds towards specific goals. By 1965 Jacques Ellul was also focused on the link between propaganda and action, while considering propaganda “A set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals….” More specific models for the interrelationship between propaganda and desired action had already been mapped by George Bruntz (1938). For example, leaflets dropped from the air onto enemy soldiers can be viewed as a “propaganda of despair” intended to “break down the morale of the enemy,” and at the same time as a “propaganda of hope” intended to present to the enemy army and civilians a picture of a promised land they can enter if they will only lay down their arms.

Understanding propaganda as a way to drive a specific mode of action among a target audience highlights the dual role of propaganda. On the one hand, it seeks to shape a particular world view and offer a specific interpretation of something happening in the environment surrounding the subject. On the other hand, by relying on the symbolic dissemination of meanings, it also seeks to support or provoke an action by this subject that will impact and potentially change the environment in a specific way. This duality can be captured and conceptualized if we approach propaganda from a mediational perspective (Kaptelinin, 2014), in other words, as something that shapes the relationship between a subject and their environment. Relying on that approach, I offer a definition of propaganda that relies on a notion of mediation:

Propaganda is an intentional effort to shape the relationship between an individual target of information (the subject) and their environment (the object) by relying on the dissemination of symbolic meaning in order to support a particular course of the subject’s activity in relation to specific objects of activity.

In a nutshell, digital propaganda changes the relationship between users (subjects) and conflict (objects of users’ activity in their environment).

The relationship between subject and object has two directions. The first direction, from the world towards the subject, relies on the mediation of meaning. The second direction, from the subject towards the world, relies on the mediation of activity. Propaganda aims either to support or change an existing relationship to an object, or to construct a new object that requires the subject’s activity. The intentional construction of subject-object relationships may rely on manipulative psychological techniques, as well as on the dissemination of disinformation. The mediational perspective suggests that the discussion of digital affordances should focus on how new digital means of production and the proliferation of propaganda change the relationship between a subject and their environment. The relationship between digital users in conflicts is an example of the subject-object relationship. In that case, the mediation perspective explores not only how propaganda offers new frames and interpretations of different conflict-related events, but also illustrates the range of activities that is offered to users relying on digital tools in conflict situations.

I’ll note, however, that propaganda does not necessarily aim to construct an active relationship between subject and object. As pointed out by Ellul, one mode of activity is passivity, which is sometimes the mode that the propagandist desires. This often happens in cases where propaganda seeks to induce disorientation, a situation “in which the target population simply loses the ability to tell truth from falsehood or where to go for help in distinguishing between the two” (Benkler et al., 2018).

To sum up, propaganda is not only a way to change a person’s perception of the environment via symbolic means, but also a way to change the behavior of a target audience in order to change the environment. In this sense, mediation always acts in two directions: One, it aims to change the perceptions of the recipient/ target audience (a group of subjects). Two, it aims to shape the activity of the target audience in relation to the environment (or lack of action, should the activity need to be neutralized). In the past, these two processes were distinguishable from each other. First, a subject received a message via an artifact, either in public spaces (e.g. posters, cinema, newsstands or loudspeakers) or in private spaces (TV or radio receivers). The subject then chose to act in accordance with the message they received.

Digital affordances have now changed the structure of relationships between messaging that tinkers with the subject’s perception of the environment and the subject’s activity in relation to that environment. Digital platforms allow Internet users to not only consume information, but to also choose from a broad range of potential follow-on activities in relation to the objects whose perception is shaped by propaganda. In order to understand the effects of “rewired propaganda,” we need to look specifically at how the design of our digital information environment allows for new kinds of links between how subjects receive information and their activity after they receive it.

The Participatory Affordances of Propaganda

Over the last century, propaganda has gradually moved from open squares and public places to our homes. This process can be associated with the domestication of technologies, where the device that mediates meanings, particularly the TV, has continuously occupied domestic spaces (Silverstone, 1994). The boundaries of spaces in which we consume media have expanded further with the rise of mobile technologies including laptops and handheld devices. Maren Hartmann (2013) describes this trend as a shift from domestication to “mediated mobilism.”

As a consequence, propaganda infiltrates our most intimate spaces, where users interact with their laptops and mobile devices. The location of technological interaction is not simply the household, but the bed or sofa — spaces commonly associated with relaxation and entertainment. Propaganda moves from the living room to the bedroom, follows people as they travel to work on crowded public transport, and remains with them in office time. We can wake up and fall asleep with propaganda in our hands. It finds us at the university, in the bathroom or on the beach.

Propaganda is also reshaped by the design of the spaces in which content is encountered and shared. Traditional media relied on physical artifacts such as newspapers or TV, so content consumption was mostly a solitary activity rather than a social one. Even when news consumption happened in a public place, for example, people listening to the radio outside in the square or friends or family watching TV news together, the media space and the social interaction space were separate. In contrast, the interactive nature of digital media removes the gap between the space where content is generated and distributed and the space where content is consumed and discussed. Social networking platforms combine news consumption with social interaction, turning social interaction into a mechanism of content proliferation and selective amplification (Zuckerman, 2018).

The integration of content generation/sharing and content discussion creates an immersive effect whereby users are unable to separate content consumption (and its impact on their lives) from their personal communication. In online environments, the consumption of propaganda is deeply embedded in the structure of social relations, which allows the propaganda to further infiltrate our everyday lives. More important are the ways social media and the spread of online content create opportunities for immediate action: spreading propaganda further, or taking other actions directly suggested by the propaganda.

Propaganda has often been linked to a desired mode of action, such as surrender or contributing one’s resources to a specific cause. Historically, however, the means of propaganda distribution and the means of action were separate and distinct. The target (or subject) of propaganda was first exposed to a message (via leaflet, poster, newspaper article, or broadcast message), which they subsequently acted upon. Due to the participatory nature of digital technologies, propaganda distribution, consumption, and participation often share the same platform and are mediated by the same digital devices (such as mobile phones or laptops). The person exposed to propaganda is also offered a selection of actions to carry out (often instantly) in the same virtual environment.

The consequences of these new participatory affordances are particularly visible in the context of conflicts. In his book iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era , Mark Andrejevic points out that “in a disturbing twist to the interactive promise of the Internet, once-passive spectators are urged to become active participants.” In this way, Andrejovic says, Internet users become citizen-soldiers when “we are invited to participate in the war on terrorism from the privacy of our homes and from our offices, or wherever we might happen to be.” David Patrikarakos analyzes a number of cases of digitally mediated citizen involvement in war and comes to the same conclusion: “In the world of Homo Digitalis, anyone with an Internet connection can become an actor in a war” (Patrikarakos, 2017).

Social Media and Propaganda

At least three novel aspects in the relationship between social media and propaganda are worth considering:

Digitally mediated participation in the creation and proliferation of propaganda and various online content-related activities, including various forms of engagement with content (from commenting to complaining).

Digitally mediated participation in online and offline action triggered by propaganda, beyond content-related activities and relying on various forms of crowdsourcing.

The action of disconnection, using digital means to effect the immediate cutting of social ties, including unfollowing, unfriending or blocking.

The participatory nature of propaganda, particularly where propaganda is linked to a call to take part in propaganda efforts, has been well-documented. “Peer-to-peer propaganda” is a situation where “Ordinary people experience the propaganda posts as something shared by their own trusted friends, perhaps with comments or angry reactions, shaping their own opinions and assumptions” (Haigh et al., 2017). The same researchers argue that “States can rely on citizens’ do-it-yourself disinformation campaigns to maintain the status quo.” Mejias and Vokuev (2017) point out that “…social media can also give ordinary citizens the power to generate false and inaccurate information,” while “propaganda is co-produced by regimes and citizens.” Finally, Khaldarova and Pantti (2016) explore participatory verification of data, where an online initiative such as the StopFake platform “mobilizes ordinary Internet users to engage in detecting and revealing fabricated stories and images on the Ukraine crisis” and address this as “Crowdsourced Information Warfare.”

It is important to differentiate between open and transparent calls to participate in the generation, proliferation, and verification of content in order to support your state, and various forms of clandestine or camouflaged online manipulation designed to trigger user participation. An illustration of an open call can be seen in the case of the Ukrainian I-army project launched by the Ukrainian Ministry of Information:

“In one year, we created a powerful army that defends us in the Donbas area. Now, it’s time to resist Russian invaders on the information front. Every Ukrainian who has access to the Internet can contribute to the struggle. Every message is a bullet in the enemy’s mind.”

A similar type of initiative could be seen on the Russian side. A website, “ Internet Militia ” called on Internet users to take part in defense of the Motherland:

“Even in five minutes you can do a lot. “Internet Militia” — this is a news feed, where links are accompanied by suggestions for direct action. For example, follow the link and leave a comment. What could be easier? Today it is important the participation of everyone who loves his Motherland.”

In many cases, however, user participation is driven not by open, direct calls, but by various forms of psychological manipulation. We can see forms of propaganda that support user engagement via the sharing of the emotional, imaginary and so-called “fake news” and through the activity of state-sponsored trolls and computational propaganda. We can also differentiate between volunteer and paid forms of users participation. These paid forms of participation (as in the case of the Chinese 50 cents party ) limit the scope of participants and usually operate in secret. In other cases, user generated propaganda transforms from crowd participation to targeted engagement of selected users who develop specific skills, as in the case of the Russian troll factory in Ol’gino where “More than 1,000 paid bloggers and commenters reportedly worked only in a single building at Savushkina Street in 2015.” This illustrates the shift from crowdsourcing to outsourcing of propaganda.

Crowdsourcing Conflict

The notion of crowdsourcing is particularly useful when analyzing participatory propaganda, as mobile devices are not only good tools for recirculating content, but also for mobilizing resources. When combined with crowdsourcing, propaganda offers a double effect. It not only builds awareness of the propaganda messaging, but also allows users to respond to propaganda issues at the same time and through the same channel. The range of user resources that can be mobilized by relying on digital mediation of propaganda is astounding and includes: sensor resources (for data collection); analytical resources (for data classification); intellectual resources (to build knowledge and skills); social resources (to engage more people around a specific goal); financial resources (also known as crowdfunding), and physical resources. Crowdsourcing also allows us to highlight how propaganda creates an emotional condition in the user, which in turn supports the mobilization of resources and reshapes the user’s priorities for future resource allocation.

Content-related activities, such as sharing, liking, commenting and complaining, can also be viewed as a form of crowdsourcing since the generation and proliferation of content also relies on the mobilization of user activity. Crowdsourcing as a concept is particularly helpful in showing how propaganda-driven digitally mediated activity goes beyond the usual content-related actions that take place online. The Russia-Georgia and Russia-Ukraine conflicts illustrate the range of potential activities in this context (Deibert et al., 2012; Hunter, 2018). This includes data-gathering for intelligence purposes, diverse forms of open-source intelligence analysis (OSINT), various forms of hacktivism, logistical support for different sides of a conflict, including the purchasing of military equipment through crowdfunding, and various forms of offline volunteering.

Some forms of participation are afforded by increasing the role of big data. For example, modern conflicts take place in an environment where all sides of the conflict as well as the local population in the areas of conflict generate conflict-related data. These data create new opportunities for gathering valuable intelligence, both for informational as well as ground warfare. In that way, users have an opportunity to participate in data generation, collection, and analysis. Some users develop skills for open source intelligence and create online data analytics communities. Examples include groups like the Ukrainian Inform-Napalm, Russian Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) and UK-based Bellingcat (Toler, 2018). Members of communities also teach others how to analyze conflict-related data. These community groups played a major role in confirming the presence of Russian soldiers in Ukraine, despite denials by Russian leaders, exposing the scale of casualties among Russian soldiers, as well as investigating the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 .

Some Russian conflict related data are not available in open sources, but are still obtained by hackers from both sides of the conflict. Various forms of hacker activities include accessing restricted data or attacking websites that are considered enemy targets. Most aspects of hacktivism require some degree of advanced skills, though a broad range of Internet users can carry out hacking-related tasks using standard computing resources and tools that simplify participation. Members of “the crowd” successfully helped analyze hacker-obtained email and other types of internal communication by the rival side of the Russian conflict. That analysis fed into propaganda and counter propaganda efforts by both sides of the conflict, while also providing valuable intelligence.

Various crowdfunding initiatives sprang up on both sides of the conflict, and relied on social networks and blogs as well as dedicated websites. These crowdfunding efforts supported both traditional military units (particularly on the Ukrainian side) as well as volunteer units, with most of the funds collected being used to purchase military equipment and ammunition. Other crowdfunding efforts enabled offline engagement of Internet users. For example, by using the funds to purchase drones, some Ukrainian users were able to self-organize and establish volunteer groups for air reconnaissance (drone-based surveillance) in order to gather real-time intelligence.

Digital platforms also played a major role in engagement and coordination of various types of warfare-related offline activities. A variety of Ukrainian groups relied on social networks, messengers, and crowdsourcing platforms to coordinate logistical support for volunteer battalions and military units. On the Russian side, dedicated Vkontakte groups as well as the website Dobrovolec.org (volunteers) helped coordinate opportunities for volunteers to join pro-Russian paramilitary units in the eastern Ukraine. And social media on both sides of the conflict allowed users to provide humanitarian assistance to people displaced by conflict.

These examples of digitally-mediated user resource mobilization illustrate the increasing scope of users’ participation in conflict. These forms of participation were shaped by the perception of the conflict as it was communicated via digital media on both the Russian and Ukraine side. I’ll also note that the scope of participation on the Ukrainian side was broader due to a shared understanding that the state is under threat of Russian aggression, and because of the limited capabilities of the Ukrainian traditional military to provide an adequate response during the initial phases of conflict. To some extent, Ukrainian users formed a digitally mediated ecosystem of participation where various forms of conflict-related activity supported one another.

The Ukrainian case demonstrates that digital platforms were effective in supporting users’ participation in conflict, not only due to the connection between the calls to action and the affordance of participation, but also because digital networks exposed the inability of traditional institutions to offer an adequate response to such an external threat. Therefore, one may argue that users’ participation was driven not only by the state’s propaganda but also by narratives related to the absence of state. One may also argue that propaganda as a strategy to shape the relationship between people and conflict aims not only to support people’s engagement, but also to control the scope of participation. On the Russian side of the conflict, the scope of users’ participation was mostly limited to online content-related activities (such as commenting, liking, sharing, etc.) and crowdfunding, while on the Ukrainian side, the scope of participation was substantially broader and went beyond the state’s control.

While participatory propaganda and crowdsourced participation leverage the non-geographic nature of digital content to place production and action in the same channel — a channel that pervades all physical and social spaces in human life — they are not the truly disruptive faces of this phenomenon. More disturbing is propaganda that seeks disconnection. Bruntz (1938) argued that one type of propaganda is “particularist propaganda” that seeks to divide the members of a target audience. Christopher Wiley, a whistleblower who revealed information about Cambridge Analytica’s operations, points out that disconnection is one of the main elements of the Breitbart doctrine that was shaped by Steve Bannon. Wiley says, “If you want to fundamentally change society, you first have to break it. And it’s only when you break it is when you can remold the pieces into your vision of a new society.” (Source: the documentary “The Great Hack”).

Digital Disconnection

Disconnection shapes the boundaries of social networks and consequently their social structure. It is easy to forget that before the digital age, disconnection from a friend required either face-to-face action, such as a refusal to shake hands, or time-consuming mediated action such as sending a letter. Online social networking sites (SNSs) offer not only easier ways to make friends, but also easier ways to unmake them. The affordance of disconnection depends on the particular design of a social networking site. For example, on Twitter a user can be unfollowed, muted, blocked and/or reported. On Facebook, one of the most common acts of disconnection is unfriending.

It is very easy to cut social ties online, as most of us know by now. And, like other types of digitally mediated activities, the disconnection takes place in the same domain as the messages are distributed. Because of this, when political messages including propaganda are pushed out, they can be followed by an immediate act of disconnection, particularly since other users take an active role in the generation and proliferation of the content. So propaganda can not only influence users’ perception of a situation and trigger activity around it, but it also shapes how we perceive other users within the situation. When we receive propaganda via social networks, we are forced to decide whether the sender should remain part of our social network.

Facebook’s design offers a fruitful environment for disconnection since it enables the “sharing [of] the same conversations with highly different audiences” (Schwarz and Shani, 2016). And because people are exposed to the political opinions of their Facebook friends, as well as other bits of information they may not have been privy to otherwise, propaganda becomes an effective tool for disconnection and polarization. Nicholas John and Shira Dvir-Gvirsman (2015) argue that Facebook unfriending can be considered “a mechanism of disconnectivity that contributes to the formation of homogeneous networks.” The constant production of categories used to divide social groups into “us” and “them” as well as disconnection between members of these groups can be viewed as a longterm impact of propaganda. That is, the impact of messages can be seen in changes to social structure and goes beyond the specific context of the situation that triggers unfriending. In the case of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, considerable evidence suggests that the conflict had a robustly destructive impact on strong ties, including those between relatives, close friends and classmates. It mainly affected relationships that had been developed long before the conflict (Asmolov, 2018).

The type of social relationship most affected by disconnective practice was between former classmates. Many platforms and groups support relationships between classmates, including Facebook and a social network called Odnoklassniki (classmates) that is popular among users aged 40 and over. Through these platforms, many people who shared the same school room dozens of years ago found themselves on different sides of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. One Facebook user reported that she unfriended two of her classmates because of their position on the situation in Crimea. Another user from Ukraine described on Facebook an experience of chatting with classmates from Russia on WhatsApp. When his classmates discovered that he lives in Ukraine, they began discussing the conflict and eventually tried to ban him from the chat. A Ukrainian user, Irina Anilovksaya, published a book in 2014 describing the experience of conflict-driven disconnection between people who were once close friends. In the book, Irina describes a two-day exchange of online messages between herself and her classmate Alexander, who lives in Russia. The story begins with a friendly discussion of the events and ends when Alexander and Irina accuse each other of being “zombies” and “people who are afraid of the truth.” They say a mutual farewell forever.

The Effects of Participatory Propaganda

What do these new digital affordances actually do to us as individuals? And what are the effects of participatory propaganda on our individual and collective psyches? Propaganda that relies on the participatory design of digital networks is best explained by looking at the link between two interrelated processes: the socialization of political conflicts and the internalization of political conflicts.

The notion of “conflict socialization” was introduced by E. E. Schattschneider (1975), who argues that “the outcome of all conflict is determined by the scope of its contagion,” while “the number of people involved in any conflict determines what happens.... every increase or reduction in the number of participants, affects the result.” The notion of the scope of contagion highlights the role of the crowd in the context of political conflicts. Schattschneider notes that, “Nothing attracts a crowd as quickly as a fight. Nothing is so contagious.” Schattschneider and others (Coser, 1956) also highlighted many years ago how political actors can control and manipulate a conflict for their own purposes.

Today the digital public sphere offers a new set of tools for the manipulation and control of citizen engagement in conflicts. The socialization of conflict is now driven by the content proliferated through social networks, as well as through the digital affordances of online platforms that offer a range of responses to conflict. The role of content in the socialization of conflicts relies on the distinctive nature of social networking platforms that combine the consumption of news with social interaction, and makes social interaction a mechanism of content proliferation. New information technologies — social networks and crowdsourcing practices — also enable the geographically unrestricted “socialization of conflict.” They provide an option not only of “watching together” but also of “acting together.” In other words, users can participate in a conflict a continent away without ever leaving the safety and comfort of their bedrooms.

As a result, one may argue that propaganda has become less interested in changing people’s opinion about a specific object or in convincing people that it is either truth or fiction. The main purpose of 21st century propaganda is to increase the scope of participation in relation to the object of propaganda. In a digital environment relying on user participation, propaganda is a technology of power that drives the socialization of conflicts and a tool for increasing the scope of contagion. While participation in political debates is often considered to be an important feature of democracy, propaganda allows us to define the structure and form of participation in a way that serves only those who generate propaganda, and minimizing the constructive outcomes of participation. In addition, the focus on propaganda as a driver of participation could be considered a meeting point between political and commercial interests, since increasing engagement with a given object of content is a path towards more pageviews and more surrender of personal data. In that sense, propaganda serves not only the political actors, but also the platform owners.

Increased participation in political conflicts also has effects on both the individual and the collective psyche. This is highlighted by the notion of internalization , developed originally as part of developmental psychology (Vygotsky, 1978). “Internalization of mediated external processes results in mediated internal processes. Externally mediated functions become internally mediated” (Kaptelinin and Nardi, 2006). Through internalization, external cultural artifacts are integrated into the cognitive process and help to define our human relationship with reality. For example, using maps gradually transforms the way we think about our environment and how we navigate it. In other cases, “likes” and emojis have been internalized and have become ingrained in our attitude toward a specific object when we think about it. The way we see things translates into our activities in relation to our environment, but the reverse is also true: Our relationship with our environment is shaped by participatory affordances and by the design of digital networks. In that way, digitally mediated participation in conflict is linked to the development of cognitive filters that shape the way we perceive social reality.

The role of internalization can be seen in the ways in which we think about conflicts and how we consider various objects in the context of a conflict. This suggests that participatory technologies that offer a broad range of ways to participate in conflict both increase socialization of conflict (meaning an increase in the scope of participation), but also create a psychological change in users. The latter process is conceptualized here as the internalization of conflict . This internalization means that the participatory design of social networks shapes not only our views on a specific issue, but our perception of our environment in general. Aleksandr Shkurko tells us that “social cognition is fundamentally categorical” (2014). According to Shkurko, “ we perceive others and regulate our behaviour according to how we position ourselves and others in the social world by ascribing them to a particular social label.” In that light, internalization means that digitally-native propaganda is able to shape the structure of categorization.

As a result, digital participatory propaganda shapes our relationship with our environment beyond any specific topic (object); it changes the apparatus of cognitive optics that structures our perception of everyday life. A conflict encountered through digital propaganda becomes a point of reference for the classification of a broad spectrum of events and social interactions. It shapes interpretative frameworks in a variety of situations that are not related directly to the conflict.

Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky noted that humanistic classification of others should rely not on abstract categories of a person’s nationality, culture, religion or political beliefs, but primarily on very specific categories that are related to their deeds; i.e. if they are greedy or not, kind or not, coward or not. Conflict-driven social classification diminishes the role of individual deeds in shaping the structure of social relations and allows the institutional actors and state-sponsored media to impose a dominant structure of classification. For example, friends, relatives, former classmates, and co-workers started to be judged based not on previous interactions, common experiences, their professionalism or their values, but based on their positions in regard to conflict. The activities of everyday life, whether related to work or just a common experience on the street, as well as personal frustrations and joys, are examined through the lens of a conflict. A birthday party or family meeting turns into a discussion of conflict, which either concludes satisfactorily because everyone agrees about the conflict, or transforms into an unpleasant and even hostile encounter if one or more individuals disagrees.

One outcome of internalization is the destruction of social ties between friends by means of disconnection. It is not so much that the shape of social categories shifts, but that certain categories become increasingly significant when it comes to classification of everyday life events and social relationships. Individuals begin to view everything through a conflict-oriented cognitive filter, including issues not at all related to the conflict. Internalizing the conflict — allowing it to reshuffle the relevance of one’s social categories — supports the socialization of the conflict, through recirculating propaganda and mobilizing resources towards crowdsourced warfare projects. In that way, the internalization and socialization of conflict mutually support and reinforce each other.

Figure 1 illustrates how these processes are interrelated. Digital platforms mediate a relationship between a user in Russia or Ukraine (subject of propaganda) and the various aspects related to perception of the conflict (object of propaganda), e.g. the Russian annexation of Crimea. The tools that mediate these relationships offer the user a broad range of conflict-related forms of participation, from proliferation of conflict-related content to crowdfunding, hacktivism, and online volunteering. This is conflict socialization. In contrast, the participation of a user also contributes to an increase in the prominence of conflict in the user’s everyday life and specifically the way conflict-related judgments shape the users’ perception of their social circles and the environment beyond the conflict. The outcome, as we discussed earlier, is that former classmates, friends, and relatives begin to identify primarily with their position vis à vis the conflict. The categories of that position are imposed by propaganda embedded in the news feeds of social networks, and whose effect is multiplied by commenting, sharing, and generating additional propaganda-related content. Those who have an opposite opinion about the topics are excluded from social circles. This is an outcome of conflict internalization.

Figure 1: The mechanism of digitally mediated participatory propaganda

Internalization explains the most insidious aspect of digital propaganda: the transformation in users’ cognitive structure that manifests as a shift in their classification structure. This shift, usually to binary thinking — in seeing the world in terms of either you support the Russian statement “Crimea is ours” or oppose it — affects all spheres of the user’s social relations and perceptions of the world far beyond the specific topic of propaganda. The collective and the individual psyche are interrelated. One may suggest that the more propaganda has been socialized, the more it is internalized by the subject and reproduced within the subject. Digitally mediated participation in propaganda-related activities makes propaganda a part of our “inner space” and allows it to define our perception of reality from within.

Conclusion: Beyond the USSR

Back in the USSR, propaganda sought to ensure that the state controlled the way its citizens perceived reality and mobilized their resources. This control was achieved by relying on a monopoly over informational sources. The purpose of Western “counter-propaganda” was to break the walls of informational isolation. The radio that I used as a child to search for “enemy voices” was actually my Internet — an opportunity to look for information in an open environment beyond the walls.

More than 30 years later we live in a significantly different information environment. Thanks to the proliferation of the Internet, states like Russia are not able to control the information environment by limiting the range of sources. Despite infrastructural support and major financial investment, state-sponsored TV channels have become less popular than YouTube (Ostrovsky, 2019). In addition, thanks to social networks and messenger services, personal communication relies on horizontal networks and is not limited by any physical borders. In the “space of flows,” as conceptualized by Manuel Castells (1999), information technologies challenge the state’s sovereignty not only over its territory but also, and significantly, over its citizens. In the multicultural and global information environment, state actors have no effective tools that allow total isolation of their citizens from a broad range of sources (with the exception of North Korea and Turkmenistan). Complete control over the information space through filtering and blocking is very hard to achieve.

The threat that comes from new information technologies was identified by some states at very early stages. The first document signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2000 was the Information Security Doctrine, which addressed new information technologies as a potential threat to political and social stability. Concern over the loss of control in the new media environment is manifest in the way the Russian authorities try to regulate the Internet. The concept of a “sovereign Internet” seeks to equalize the scale of control over cyberspace with the scale of control over offline space. But it seems that most traditional approaches to re-creating various forms of isolation, at least within the Runet, are failing.

The need to compensate for the loss of control over the media environment and social interactions between people has required new approaches. These seek not to restrict new information technologies, but to build on new digital affordances, which allow us to offer a direct link between propaganda and the mobilization of the resources of digital crowds. New forms of propaganda harness the participatory design of social networks, crowdsourcing and the affordances of disconnectivity. They flourish in an environment where news cannot be separated from interpersonal communication.

The purpose of the new propaganda is neither the production of reality nor of unreality. The new propaganda seeks to offer a new way of restoring the state’s sovereignty over people in the new information environment and to rebuild walls that have been demolished by global horizontal networks of communication. It aims to mitigate the capacity of these networks to challenge the state’s sovereignty. If the state is not able to control the flow of information and communication, it targets the way this information is interpreted and analyzed. Conflict-based cognitive filters ensure that horizontal networks and uncontrolled flows of information do not threaten a state’s control over its citizens, as well as expand the control of a state’s actors over individuals beyond its borders.

I’ll note that this essay doesn’t present an argument against digitally mediated participation in conflict. People retain the right to disconnect online as well as offline from people they don’t agree with. The question addressed here, however, is if and how these participatory and disconnective affordances can be harnessed by state actors relying on propaganda in order to achieve their political goals. One may argue, for instance, that a massive digitally mediated participation of users in the Ukrainian conflict was essential in order to protect their country from a potential security threat. It’s not my purpose to draw a line at what type of participation is genuine, and what type of participation can be considered as an outcome of political manipulation. I might argue, however, that participation that is driven by non-genuine actors and information from non-transparent sources, participation that relies on fakes, and participation that harnesses emotions is likely to be considered part of participatory propaganda. The analysis of disconnective action should also focus on whether that type of action was driven by manipulative efforts of institutional actors, shaping our relation with the environment. In that light, I argue that it is essential to understand the political goals of participatory propaganda.

Participatory propaganda restores state sovereignty from within. It aims to build walls in the inner spaces of the subject by shaping categories of perception of the environment. First, it constructs the object of a conflict that can potentially divide people. Second, relying on the design of social networks that combine information proliferation with personal interaction as well as the mediated mobility of devices, it makes this conflict an omnipresent and integral part of everyday life. Third, it offers a range of simple and immediate opportunities for participation in conflict-related activity. Fourth, it increases the importance of conflict in shaping the structure of people’s social categorizations. Finally, it relies on the affordance of disconnectivity to mitigate the capacity of horizontal networks to cross borders and challenge a state’s sovereignty.

What does this sort of propaganda do to us as a society? It is designed to implement new forms of sovereignty. It is designed to replace networked structures of society with fragmentation and polarization. It helps to pull people apart by forcing them into the role of combatants rather than citizens. It is designed to destroy horizontal relationships that offer alternative sources of information and that can potentially be transformed into independent collective action and a broad opposition to institutional actors. It is designed to divide and rule. It produces a reality with new walls and borders that can sever personal relationships and weaken critical thinking capabilities.

Participatory digital propaganda enables the private, everyday identity of users to be occupied and taken over by the institutional actors that propagate it. Addressing these effects of propaganda requires that we lessen the significance of conflict-related categorization for the interpretation of everyday life and offer alternative forms of subject-object and subject-subject relationships that are not driven by conflict. The protection of identity in a conflict-prone digital environment may rely on the user’s capacity to control the scale of their engagement in the conflict and may mitigate the role of conflict-related classification in the interpretation of social relations and everyday life. It also requires that counter-propaganda offer not an alternative view of specific events, but alternative classification structures that protect the autonomy of the subject, horizontal networks, and independent forms of collaboration.

In 2014 and 2015, something strange happened in a place apparently quite far from any conflict: the Russian-speaking segment of Tinder. One could see that an increasing number of users wrote as a part of their personal description either “Crimea ours” or “Crimea not ours.” The relationship with a conflict became not only a signifier for evaluating existing relationships, but also a driver for forming new romantic relationships and friendships. The Crimea conflict found its way into one of the most intimate aspects of life. I argue that the way to counter propaganda is not to convince others whose Crimea it is, but to weaken the role of propaganda in shaping our relations and follow Brodsky’s vision of humanistic social classification. That means we judge and love one another not on the basis of political categories that are created to divide us, but on our everyday deeds and actions.

Andrejevic, M. (2007). iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era . Lawrence, KS.: University Press of Kansas.

Anilovskaya, I. (2014) The War: the correspondence between classmates. Kiev: Alfa Reklama.

Asmolov, G. (2018). The Disconnective Power of Disinformation Campaigns. Journal of International Affairs , Special Issue 71(1.5): 69-76.

Asmolov, G. & Kolozaridi, P. (2017). The Imaginaries of RuNet: The Change of the Elites and the Construction of Online Space. Russian Politics , 2: 54-79.

Benkler Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts (2018 ), Network Propaganda Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics , Oxford University Press.

Bruntz G. C. (1938). Allied Propaganda and the Collapse of the German Empire in 1918. Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press.

Castells, M. (1999). Grassrooting the Space of Flows. Urban Geography, 20 (4):294-302.

Coser, L. A. (1956). The Functions of Social Conflict . New York: The Free Press.

Deibert, R. J., Rohozinski, R., and Crete-Nishihata, M. (2012). Cyclones in cyberspace:

Information shaping and denial in the 2008 Russia-Georgia war. Security Dialogue , 43(1).

Edwards, S. & S. Livingston (2018). Fake news is about to get a lot worse. That will make it easier to violate human rights — and get away with it. The Washington Post, April 3, 2018

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/04/03/fake-news-is-about-to-get-a-lot-worse-that-will-make-it-easier-to-violate-human-rights-and-get-away-with-it/

Ellul, J. (1965). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes . New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society . Cambridge MA.: MIT Press.

Haigh M., Haigh, T., & Kozak, N. I. (2017). Stopping Fake News. Journalism Studies , 1-26.

Hartmann, M. (2013). From Domestication to Mediated Mobilism. Mobile Media & Communication , 1 (1): 42–49.

Hunter, M. (2018). Crowdsourced War: The Political and Military Implications of Ukraine’s Volunteer Battalions 2014-2015. Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, Volume 18, Issue 3, 78-124.

Institute for Propaganda Analysis. A. McClung Lee & E. Briant Lee (Eds.) (1972). The Fine Art of Propaganda . New York: Octagon Books.

John, N. A. & Dvir-Gvirsman, S. (2015). ‘I Don’t Like You Any More’: Facebook Unfriending by Israelis During the Israel-Gaza Conflict of 2014. Journal of Communication, 65 (6): 953-974.

John, N. A. & Gal, N. (2018). “He’s Got His Own Sea”: Political Facebook Unfriending in the Personal Public Sphere. International Journal of Communication, 12 : 2971–2988.

Johnson, B. (2019) Deepfakes are solvable — but don’t forget that “shallowfakes” are already pervasive, MIT Technology Review, Mar 25, 2019 https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613172/deepfakes-shallowfakes-human-rights/

Kaptelinin, V. (2014). The Mediational Perspective on Digital Technology: Understanding the Interplay between Technology, Mind and Action. In S. Price, C. Jewitt & B. Brown (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Digital Technology Research (pp. 203-217). London: Sage.

Kaptelinin, V. & Nardi, B. A. (2006). Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

Khaldarova I & Pantti, M. (2016). Fake News. Journalism Practice , 10 (7): 891-901. DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2016.1163237

Laswell. H. (1927). Propaganda Technique in the World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Le Bon, G. (1903). The Crowd . London: Unwin.

Light, B. (2014). Disconnecting with Social Networking Sites . Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mejias U. A., & Vokuev, N. E. (2017). Disinformation and the Media: The Case of Russia and Ukraine Media. Culture & Society , 39 (7): 1027– 1042.

Oates, S. (2016). Russian Media in the Digital Age: Propaganda Rewired. Russian Politics , 1 : 398-417.

Ostrovsky, A. (2019). Russians are Shunning State-Controlled TV for YouTube.

The Economist , March 7 th . https://www.economist.com/europe/2019/03/09/russians-are-shunning-statecontrolled-tv-for-youtube

Patrikarakos, D. (2017). War in 140 Characters. How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century . New York: Basic Books.

Sanovich, S. (2017). Computational Propaganda in Russia: The Origins of Digital Disinformation. In S. Woolley & P. N. Howard (Eds.), Working Paper 2017.3 . Oxford: Project on Computational Propaganda.

Schattschneider, E. E. (1975). The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America . Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Schwarz, O. & Shani, G. (2016). Culture in Mediated Interaction: Political Defriending on Facebook and the Limits of Networked Individualism. American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 4 : 385–421.

Shkurko, A. V. (2014). Cognitive Mechanisms of Ingroup/Outgroup Distinction. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 45 (2): 188-213.

Silverstone, R. (1994). Television and Everyday Life . London: Routledge.

Silverstone, R. (2002). Complicity and Collusion in the Mediation of Everyday Life. New Literary History, 33 (4): 761-780.

Stuart, C. (1920). Secrets of Crewe House: The Story of a Famous Campaign . London, New York, and Toronto: Hodder and Stoughton.

Toler A. (2018) Crowdsourced and Patriotic Digital Forensics in the Ukrainian Conflict. In: Hahn O., Stalph F. (eds) Digital Investigative Journalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978), Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.

Wooley S. C., & Howard, P. N. (2016). Political Communication, Computational Propaganda, and Autonomous Agents. International Journal of Communication , 10 : 4882–4890.

Zuckerman, E. (2018) Four problems for news and democracy, Medium.com. https://medium.com/trust-media-and-democracy/we-know-the-news-is-in-crisis-5d1c4fbf7691

Propaganda Education for a Digital Age

• Posted March 4, 2021
• By Jill Anderson
• Moral, Civic, and Ethical Education
• Teachers and Teaching
• Technology and Media

While most of us don’t think about propaganda as something occurring today, it is everywhere. Propaganda is part of our news, entertainment, education, social media, and more. In order to understand the complexities of propaganda, we have to teach it, says Renee Hobbs , Ed.D.’85, director of the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island.

“When you start to learn about propaganda, you inevitably realize the value and the importance of multiperspectival thinking,” she says. “The ability to think about a topic from a range of different points of view turns out to be incredibly powerful, to activate intellectual curiosity, to promote reasoning, to encourage genuine value judgements.”

Hobbs shares that understanding propaganda and being able to analyze, critique, and create it can strengthen democracy and impact the growing polarization in the country. In this episode of the Harvard EdCast, Hobbs shares how to revitalize propaganda education in the digital age.

• Propaganda education can fit in across all parts of the curriculum.
• A key goal of propaganda education is how to interpret messages while being mindful and strategic. Use familiar and inquiry-oriented pedagogies to help reflect and make meaning. Layer these practices in different subjects being studied. No matter what the subject, Hobbs contends that propaganda can be richly explored.
• Reinforce basic media literacy education practices in the home. Have conversations about who is the author of this message, what is their purpose, when we're playing a game, when we're reading a picture book, when we're checking out the Facebook feed, and when we're talking with grandma on the Zoom. Who's the author, what's the purpose tends to be a really great way to help kids understand that messages are created by people who have motives and purposes.

Jill Anderson: I'm Jill Anderson, this is The Harvard EdCast.

Most of us hear the word propaganda and don't think about it as a modern occurrence. Professor Renee Hobbs says we encounter propaganda at least once an hour in the news, entertainment, social media, and more. She is an expert in digital and media literacy who's been studying propaganda for decades. She believes learning to identify and understand propaganda is crucial for our democracy and also in navigating the overwhelming digital world we live. Yet, propaganda is often missing from school curriculums or is taught in outdated ways. I wanted to know more about propaganda education, but first, I asked Renee what propaganda is today and how we encounter it.

Renee Hobbs: Many different forms of expression that your listeners encounter every single day can be understood as propaganda, even though we might use words like clickbait, sponsored content, memes, social media posts, personalized search, and many other practices. The definition of propaganda changes as society changes. I like to think about propaganda's essential elements as having to do with intentional and strategic influence of public opinion. That's a really broad definition, but it really fits the contemporary era where propaganda can be found in news and journalism, in advertising and public relations, in government, in entertainment, in information, and even in education.

Jill Anderson: Our society and our world and our technology are really good at creating intentional and non-intentional things that we cannot even differentiate what's real and what's not.

Renee Hobbs: Yeah, it turns out that we've known for a long time that you can bypass people's critical thinking by activating strong emotions and responding to audience's deepest hopes, fears, and dreams by simplifying information. In fact, simplifying information has kind of become essential in an age where there's so much information. To break through the clutter, you have to have a snappy headline, it has to be shorter. Concision is a value of journalism as you know, but those are also practices that can lead to the bypassing of critical thinking. In some ways, we now encounter a lot of different messages where our feelings are activated, where we think we know what the story is because it's got a simple headline and it somehow appeals to our core values so we accept it, but we don't engage in the practice of critically analyzing it. My work in propaganda is in relation to my passionate efforts to bring media literacy education into American elementary and secondary schools.

Jill Anderson: Tell me a little bit about how learning about propaganda is a way to navigate this complex media environment that we're all engaging in.

Renee Hobbs: One of the claims I make is the idea that propaganda is in the eye of the beholder, that you might see that funny comedy, the interview about the goofy journalists who are sent out to assassinate a world leader, you might see that as entertainment, but when I watch it, I see something that looks darkly, darkly like a form of imperialistic propaganda. To me, it looks awfully devious to have the good guys go out and commit a political assassination, even if it's done in a very, very humorous way.

When you start to learn about propaganda, you inevitably realize the value and the importance of multiperspectival thinking. The ability to think about a topic from a range of different points of view turns out to be incredibly powerful, to activate intellectual curiosity, to promote reasoning, to encourage genuine value judgements. But multiperspectival thinking is hard. Looking at propaganda creates these fun ways to recognize that messages can be understood in many different ways, there's no one right answer. That's partly why I think it's so exciting to study propaganda with students because the discovery that it's the active interpretation that creates the meaning, well, that's a huge aha for studying anything. Literature, science, mathematics, philosophy, the arts, everything hinges on that in some ways.

Jill Anderson: Where are we in terms of how, and if, this is actually being taught in schools?

Renee Hobbs: Well, here comes the bad news, Jill. I started doing my work in propaganda in 2007 when I had a consultancy with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. They had a special exhibit at that time called The State of Deception, it was about the history of Nazi propaganda. They wanted to help people make connections between the past historical propaganda of the 20th century Germany and bring it into contemporary times.

That inquiry led me to ask the same question that you just posed to me, where is propaganda taught in American public schools? What I learned is that it's only taught in history class and it's only taught in the context of Nazi Germany. Sometimes, if you go to a very good school, you'll get a study of propaganda in the context of learning about World War II, but that's it. It's only studied as a historical topic.

That led me to wonder, well, why is propaganda not studied in English language arts, because it used to be. I discovered that back in the 1930s, English teachers were indeed teaching about propaganda, during the 1930s, as antisemitism was rising in the United States and as radio personalities were on the radio saying all manner of idiotic things, dangerous and idiotic things. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis, in 1937, spent over a million dollars in 1930s money, with support from businessman, Edward Filene of Filene's Department Store. This was a really influential effort as this lesson plans and curriculum materials were brought into thousands and thousands of American high schools.

Many of the concepts that were introduced in the 1930s are the same concepts that are used in high schools today. For instance, if you look at an example of propaganda and you identify it as a glittering generality, or if you say, "Oh, it looks like they want everybody to do it. Everybody's doing it, so you should too," that's called the bandwagon effect. Well, those concepts are 70 years old and they were designed for radio, to analyze radio and news media.

That led me to wonder what happened. It turned out that right around the time of the 1990s, there was a little bit of attention to persuasive genres, studying persuasive genres in English class, but then along came the Common Core State Standards. The Common Core State Standards shifted the way English teachers thought about the relationship between logos, pathos, and ethos. The Common Core Standards redefined persuasion as argumentation and said that the only legitimate form of persuasion to study in schools was the logical kind, the one with reasoning and evidence and arguments. The other kind of persuasion, the one that activated strong feelings, the one that tapped into your deepest hopes, fears and dreams, the one that attacks opponents, well, that's not the kind of persuasive content you study in schools. Common Core State Standards redefined what counts as persuasion, and therefore, only a very narrow band of persuasive texts were studied.

A scholar named David Fleming wrote a really powerful essay tracing this historical trajectory in a publication for English educators. I found it very compelling because, essentially, conflating argumentation and propaganda, conflating argumentation as the only form of persuasive discourse leaves kids at a real disadvantage, given that most of the persuasive messaging they encounter in the world outside of school, well, it isn't logical at all. It's emotional, it's based on the credibility and character of the speaker. So kids end up with a real deficit in their understanding right now.

Jill Anderson: Are you actually seeing some restoration of this back into the curriculum in places or-

Renee Hobbs: Oh, absolutely. In fact, one of the most important moves happened in the National Council of Teachers of English, the national membership organization for English educators with more than 25,000 members. In 2019, they issued a really important resolution. It was called the Resolution on English Education for Critical Literacy in Politics. This is a formal statement approved by the NCTE membership that says, unfortunately, this post-truth society, which is characterized by the routine use of political lying, where we come to accept as routine lies that are not condemned, if we're living in a society where that's our reality, then we need to be able to interrogate the new types of texts that are circulating in culture. They offer a set of resolutions that suggest that students be able to learn to analyze and evaluate sophisticated persuasive techniques in all texts, genres, and types of media, and that they resist attempts to influence discussion through falsehoods or through stereotypes or attempts to shame or silence, that they recognize what are the forms of deliberative dialogue that promote democratic practice and what are the forms of communication and expression that shut them down.

This, I think, is issuing in a little bit of a call to action as English teachers take up the challenge. Of course it is a challenge, Jill, because, well, bringing controversial texts into the classroom for discussion can be challenging for teachers, in this culture where some teachers have gotten criticized for bringing in the New York Times. Imagine that. It takes courage and good pedagogical strategy to teach about propaganda in the climate of polarization that we are now living in.

Jill Anderson: For a lot of teachers, I imagine it's challenging to know how to handle this. Also, you have the challenge of adults struggling themselves with navigating these issues as well. What do you recommend for teachers who are feeling a little bit scared to do this on how to take those steps without maybe losing their jobs.

Renee Hobbs: Right.

Jill Anderson: Or getting that angry letter from a parent or email or something.

Renee Hobbs: Right. There are 70 stories in this book of educators that I've interviewed or met or read about their work who are doing propaganda education in really simple and innovative ways. Like the art teacher at Charlemont Academy, who has her students create lithograph posters as they learn to create propaganda as a means to begin thinking about how propaganda works, why it works, what its visual appeal is, and how it persuades. Or the school library media specialist from Deerfield, Massachusetts, who introduces teaching about propaganda by using one of the Mo Willems books, Pigeon Wants a Puppy. Pigeon is so trying to get a puppy that sometimes he persuades with facts and sometimes he persuades with feelings. Even young children, as young as five or six years old, can understand the different ways that people try to influence each other to get what they want.

Jill Anderson: As a parent, it's hard for me to imagine introducing some of these concepts to a young child. What can parents and caregivers do at home to help teach their children about this?

Renee Hobbs: I think basic media literacy education is a perfect way to engage in these practices in the home. We generally say to parents, "Look, there are so many opportunities to have conversations about who is the author of this message, what is their purpose," when we're playing a game, when we're reading a picture book, when we're checking out the Facebook feed, and when we're talking with grandma on the Zoom. Who's the author, what's the purpose tends to be a really great way to help kids understand that messages are created by people who have motives and purposes.

It's harder and harder for parents to engage in co-viewing practices because kids now have their own devices very early, we're all in a very hyper specialized way, but the idea of reflecting on our pleasures and noticing what attracts and holds our attention. Even young children can begin to say, "I like this game because it does X, Y, and Z." A kid who can come up with a sentence like that is more media literate than a kid who says, "I like it because it's funny." The idea of helping kids build the practice of reasoning about one's pleasures and choices and preferences, this is a very simple way to introduce media literacy in the home. Jill, I'm guessing that you do that all the time with your kid, right?

Jill Anderson: I have to say yes, of course.

Renee Hobbs: Yes, because as a trained media professional, you've internalized media literacy. Of course you think about the purpose, the author, and the point of view, but not everybody does.

Jill Anderson: I mean, on some level we do at home. I think we do a lot of discussions about commercials in my house, even though in a lot of ways it's always subtly there in some way, advertising.

Renee Hobbs: I'm so glad you're talking about that, Jill, because in fact, that is the best way to introduce propaganda education to young children. Learning about advertising is a developmentally-appropriate set of knowledge and skills for children in the elementary grades. You don't want to introduce young children to disinformation and harmful propaganda, but you sure do want to help them recognize how advertising persuades, right?

Jill Anderson: Right.

Renee Hobbs: You also want to talk about how activists use images and symbols and emotional appeals to persuade. I mean, Greta Thunberg is perhaps the most famous teenage propagandist of all time and she's brilliant at it, but let's be clear, it's a form of beneficial propaganda. Her efforts to hold us grown-ups accountable to the devastation of our ecological destruction is argued beautifully as she uses reasoning and evidence and facts, but as she uses the power of emotional appeals and her character, she's a very effective propagandist. I think right now, many young people who are looking to make change, make a difference, fix some of the many, many issues and challenges we face in society, I think they well understand the value of positive propaganda to address those big social challenges.

Jill Anderson: I'm glad you mentioned her as an example, because I think a lot of us, myself included, come from that lens of looking at propaganda solely as a bad thing because a lot of us learn it that way. You have said that this is propaganda doesn't have to be something that's negative.

Renee Hobbs: Propaganda is an essential part of the democratic process. Propaganda is how citizens use the power of communication and information to make a difference in the world. We couldn't have free and fair elections if we didn't have election propaganda, because people make decisions about who their leaders are based on logos, ethos, and pathos. Once you open up your thinking beyond thinking of propaganda as a smear word, you discover how relevant it is to every aspect of our social, political, cultural, educational lives.

Jill Anderson: But I think there's so many people right now looking at the world, thinking we've got all these threats of fake news that get thrown out there and growing conspiracies, and we're very divided. Propaganda education is one way to help us better understand that and maybe close the divide?

Renee Hobbs: Propaganda is both the cause and the cure for what ails us in society. Propaganda has helped to widen the polarization and the strategy of attacking opponents is really good at that, right?

Jill Anderson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Renee Hobbs: You create an us versus them feeling, you reinforce tribalism, and all of a sudden people see each other as enemies to be feared. But propaganda is also the only way that we come together as a society. It's the one way that we are induced to act together. Good propaganda can help us recognize the similarities that exist between us, the common values that bind us together as a people, and the deeper truths, the emotional and moral truths, that all human beings share.

The original meaning of the word propaganda, remember, is in spreading the gospel of love and forgiveness. We're going to need a heck of a lot of love and forgiveness if we're going to move forward. The cure for polarization is going to have to involve a great bit of critical thinking and an awful lot of love and forgiveness, because the way love and forgiveness come into cure us from this disease of polarization is if I'm willing to acknowledge that my understanding of the world is selective and incomplete, I don't have the whole story. I can't state for certain what is capital T truth, and I'm not going to find it through fact checking or experts or any of that. It's going to be a collaborative enterprise. I'm going to need a little help from my friends. The intellectual humility of acknowledging that we need each other to come to consensus, it's actually really liberating.

Jill Anderson: Yeah, and it sounds like everybody could benefit from having some propaganda education because this is only going to probably get more complex as media continues to evolve.

Renee Hobbs: Yeah, and at the same time, I would say that the pedagogies for teaching propaganda are not brand new pedagogies that you've never heard of, right?

Renee Hobbs: It's basically this practice of being metacognitive about how you interpret messages and being mindful and strategic in reflecting on the meaning making that you're doing. The pedagogies are very familiar, they're inquiry-oriented, they're rooted in reflection and meaning making, so it's not that hard to include them, to layer them into your science class. If you're studying the environment, you should darn well be studying environmental propaganda. If you're studying literature, you should be looking at language as propaganda. If you're studying art, Banksy is a must. You have to study art as propaganda.

Propaganda fits across the curriculum everywhere, with pedagogies that are familiar to teachers. All those great teachers that I found who were doing it made me realize that if we change our attitude about propaganda, we can in fact have a big influence in bringing media literacy competencies to all Americans.

Jill Anderson: Professor Renee Hobbs is the founder and director of the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island. She's the author of numerous books about media literacy, including Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education for a Digital Age.

I'm Jill Anderson. This is The Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.

Hobbs' new book, Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education for a Digital Age is the winner of the AAP PROSE Award for Excellence in Social Sciences for 2021. She also created a variety of digital resources to accompany the book , including the Propaganda Gallery, a crowdsourced collection of over 3,500 examples of contemporary propaganda suitable for educational use.

An education podcast that keeps the focus simple: what makes a difference for learners, educators, parents, and communities

Related Articles

The Complex World of Teens and Screens

Making Space for Difficult Discussions

Following the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, suggestions for educators and parents on how to support productive conversations around traumatic events

Anti-Oppressive Social Studies for Elementary School

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Ukraine invasion — explained

The roots of Russia's invasion of Ukraine go back decades and run deep. The current conflict is more than one country fighting to take over another; it is — in the words of one U.S. official — a shift in "the world order." Here are some helpful stories to make sense of it all.

Here's how propaganda is clouding Russians' understanding of the war in Ukraine

A resident cleans her balcony in an apartment building damaged by shelling in Kyiv on Tuesday. Fadel Senna/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A resident cleans her balcony in an apartment building damaged by shelling in Kyiv on Tuesday.

Russia has cracked down on free speech and placed strict propaganda controls on what citizens see and hear about the brutal war in Ukraine.

Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a rule that criminalizes reporting that contradicts the Russian government's version of events. The law has forced many independent media outlets to leave the country, shut down — or face potential lengthy prison terms.

Julia Ioffe, reporter and founding partner of the media company Puck, joined Morning Edition to discuss how Russia is sanitizing the war to cloud its citizens' views. Listen here.

A Russian who protested the war on live TV refused to retract her statement in court

"[Russians] are being told that Russian soldiers are extremely decorous and careful about preserving Ukrainian civilian life, that they're being greeted as liberators, that everybody wants to live under Russian rule, and that there are no civilian casualties on the Ukrainian side," reports Ioffe.

State media doesn't use the words "war" or "invasion" and doesn't mention Russia's bombing of Kyiv.

How to spot disinformation and propaganda coming out of the Ukraine-Russia conflict

The Kremlin has weaponized social media as well, hiring trolls to spread disinformation about the war and stir up fights online, says Ioffe.

Some Russians are turning to alternative sources for the truth and to break through propaganda. Some use VPNs — or virtual private networks — to mask their locations to access blocked sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and media organizations that report independently from the Kremlin, says Ioffe. Demand for VPNs shot up by more than 2,000% on Sunday, the day before the Putin regime shut off access to Instagram .

"But you have to understand that to go and do this, you already have to be looking. It's people who already don't believe what the Kremlin information sources are telling them," says Ioffe. "They know that this is a war against Ukrainian civilians."

All of this means the truth about the war is hard to find and mostly is discovered by people who already distrust the Kremlin and its state-sponsored media.

Russia arrests nearly 5,000 anti-war protesters over the weekend

"People who are not looking for this information are generally people who don't care, or people who trust Kremlin sources of information. And if they trust those sources of information, then they believe, for the most part, what the Kremlin is telling them, and for the most part, they support this war," Ioffe says.

"But the war they're supporting is not the war that exists on the ground in Ukraine."

This story originally appeared on the Morning Edition live blog .

Beyond Intractability

The Hyper-Polarization Challenge to the Conflict Resolution Field We invite you to participate in an online exploration of what those with conflict and peacebuilding expertise can do to help defend liberal democracies and encourage them live up to their ideals.

Follow BI and the Hyper-Polarization Discussion on BI's New Substack Newsletter .

Hyper-Polarization, COVID, Racism, and the Constructive Conflict Initiative Read about (and contribute to) the  Constructive Conflict Initiative  and its associated Blog —our effort to assemble what we collectively know about how to move beyond our hyperpolarized politics and start solving society's problems. 

By Eric Brahm

August 2006  

The term propaganda has a nearly universally negative connotation. Walter Lippmann described it as inherently "deceptive" and therefore evil.[1] Propaganda is more an exercise of deception rather than persuasion. Partisans often use the label to dismiss any claims made by their opponents while at the same time professing to never employ propaganda themselves. It is akin to advertising and public relations, but with political purpose. Although propaganda has been utilized for centuries, the term was first used in 1622 when Pope Gregory XV issued the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide to counter the growing Protestant threat in order "to reconquer by spiritual arms" those areas "lost to the Church in the debacle of the sixteenth century."[2] Propaganda has become a common element of politics and war. As new communications technologies have developed, propagandists have developed new methods to reach increasingly large audiences in order to shape their views. The shift to targeting mass audiences and not just elite publics has been called by some as "new propaganda."[3] This essay aims to provide a brief overview of the concept of propaganda, various propaganda techniques, and related topics.

In a nutshell, propaganda is designed to manipulate others' beliefs and induce action in the interest of the propagator by drilling the message into the listeners' heads. It involves the use of images, slogans and symbols to play on prejudices and emotions. The ultimate goal of propaganda is to entice the recipient of the message to come to 'voluntarily' accept the propagandist's position as if it was one's own. Propaganda may be aimed at one's own people or at members of other groups. It can be designed to agitate the population or to pacify it. We often think of propaganda as false information that is meant to reassure those who already believe. Believing what is false can create cognitive dissonance, which people are eager to eliminate. Therefore, propaganda is often directed at those who are already sympathetic to the message in order to help overcome this discomfort. One the one hand, then, propaganda generally aims to construct the self as a noble, strong persona to which individuals in the domestic population can feel connected. At the same time, propaganda often attempts to rally the domestic public to action creating fear, confusion, and hatred by portraying the antagonist as an abominable figure.[4] Typically, the Other is demonized or dehumanized.[5] Stereotyping and scapegoating are common tactics in this regard. At its most extreme, propaganda is intended to overcome a reluctance to kill. In its modern usage, propaganda also tends to be characterized by some degree of institutionalization, mass distribution, and repetition of the message. [6]

Propagandists often conceal their purpose, even their identity, in order to distract the public. White propaganda, for instance, is from a correctly identified source and is not intentionally deceptive. Black propaganda, by contrast, is purposefully deceptive in giving the impression that the source is friendly.[7] Finally, the term gray propaganda has been used to describe propaganda that falls somewhere in between.

Although the range of propaganda techniques is seemingly limitless, space permits only an abbreviated discussion.[8] One common technique is bandwagoning, in other words appealing to people's desire to belong especially to the winning side, rather than the rightness of the position. Doublespeak involves the use of language that is deliberately constructed to disguise or distort its actual meaning. Examples might include downsizing, extraordinary rendition, or the coalition of the willing. These may take the form of euphemisms, which are used to make something sound better than it is such as the term collateral damage. Another strategy is to appeal to authority. For instance, the World War II-era series This is War! emphasized how FDR's leadership qualities were similar to greats like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.[9] At other times, testimonials may be effective. Propaganda is also often heavily laced with rationalization and oversimplification. On the latter point, glittering generalities are words that, while they may have different positive meaning for individual, are linked to concepts that are highly valued by the group. Therefore, when these words are invoked, they demand approval without thinking, simply because such an important concept is involved. For example, when a person is asked to do something in 'defense of democracy' they are more likely to agree. The concept of democracy has a positive connotation to them because it is linked to a concept that they value. Propagandists sometimes use simple name-calling to draw a vague equivalence between a concept and a person, group, or idea. At other times, they may use "plain folks rhetoric" in order to convince the audience that they, and their ideas, are "of the people." Finally, propaganda often tries to at least implicitly gain the approval of respected and revered social institutions such as church or nation in order to transfer its authority and prestige to the propagandist's program.

Overall, many have pointed out that the most effective propaganda campaigns rely heavily on selective truth-telling, the confusion of means and ends, and the presentation of a simple idyllic vision that glosses over uncomfortable realities.[10] Psychologists Pratkanis and Aronson recommend four strategies for a successful propaganda campaign.[11] The first point is the importance of pre-persuasion. The propagandist should attempt to create a climate in which the message is more likely to be believed. Second is the credibility of the source. He/she should be a likable or authoritative communicator. Third, the message should be focused on simple, achievable goals. Finally, the message should arouse the emotions of the recipient and provide a targeted response.

It is unclear whether technological developments are making propaganda efforts easier or not. On the one hand, advances in communications technologies may be reducing government control over information.[12] Through the internet and satellite television, people need no longer rely solely on their governments for information. On the other hand, technology may make propaganda more effective. For example, it can make the experience of war more superficial and distort the lessons of prior conflict.[13] In addition, one can get overwhelmed with the amount of information on the internet, making it difficult to determine whether a particular source is credible. What is more, there appears to be significant 'virtual Balkanization' in which like-minded individuals form closed communities in which other viewpoints are not sought after.

Whether for scholars or the average person, Jowett and O'Donnell offer a 10 point checklist for analyzing propaganda:[14]

• The ideology and purpose of the propaganda campaign,
• The context in which the campaign occurs (for example, history or the ideological and social mileu),
• Identification of the propagandist,
• The structure of the propaganda organization (for example, identifying the leadership, organizational goals, and the form of media utilized),
• The target audience,
• Media utilization techniques,
• Special techniques to maximize effect (which include creating resonance with the audience, establishing the credibility of the source, using opinion leaders, using face-to-face contact, drawing upon group norms, using rewards and punishment, employing visual symbols of power, language usage, music usage, and arousing emotions),
• Audience reaction to various techniques,
• Counterpropaganda (if present),
• Effects and evaluation.

Psychological Operations (PSYOPs)

PSYOPs are a military tactic that also involves the use of propaganda. Rather than build support amongst one's citizenry, the goal is to demoralize one's opponent and create confusion. Since World War II, most wars have seen the creation of radio stations that broadcast music and news meant to hurt morale of the opposition. Dropping leaflets over enemy lines and even amongst the civilian population of one's opponents is also common. These techniques are designed to promote dissension and defections from enemy combat units as well as emboldening dissident groups within the country. PSYOPs can also provide cover and deception for one's own operations. Finally, PSYOPs may have the added benefit boosting the morale of one's own troops as well as amongst resistance groups behind enemy lines.

Public Diplomacy

More generally, public diplomacy involves the attempt to influence foreign publics without the use of force. The now-defunct U.S. Information Agency defined public diplomacy as "promoting the national interest and the national security of the United States through understanding, informing, and influencing foreign publics and broadening dialogue between American citizens and institutions and their counterparts abroad."[15] The areas of public diplomacy used to influence foreign target audiences are media diplomacy, public information, internal broadcasting, education and cultural programs, and political action. The idea of public diplomacy emerged from the Office of War Information, which existed during WWII. During the early part of the Cold War, a succession of offices within the U.S. Department of State had responsibility for the dissemination of information abroad. During the Eisenhower Administration, an independent agency was created for the purpose. The agency was later abolished by President Carter and its functions folded into the newly created International Communication Agency (ICA) in 1978 (later redesignated US Information Agency, or USIA, in 1982 during the Reagan Administration). In the 1990s, USIA and the Voice of America (VOA) were incorporated back into the State Department. Most recently, the White House established its own Office of Global Communications in 2001 to formulate and coordinate messages to foreign audiences. Other significant agencies include the International Broadcasting Bureau and the National Endowment for Democracy.

One observer has suggested a list of best practices in the conduct of public diplomacy, at least from the perspective of the United States.[16]

• First, the primary goal is policy advocacy, in other words, to ensure that foreign publics understand US policies and motivations. As such, public diplomacy must be incorporated into foreign policy and it should involve coordination amongst a number of government agencies.
• Second, public diplomacy must be rooted in American culture and values.
• Third, the messages conveyed need to be consistent, truthful, and credible.
• Fourth, it is important to tailor messages to a particular audience.
• Fifth, a strategy needs to reach not only to opinion leaders, but also the mass public through national and global media outlets.
• Sixth, there are a number of nonstate actors such as MNCs, the expatriot community, and humanitarian organizations that can serve as partners to help deliver the message accurately.
• Finally, the US needs to recognize public diplomacy is a dialogue and to also listen to sentiment in other countries.

The Internet has become a major tool for information dissemination and interactive communication between the US government and their target populations as well as developing links with civil society actors around the world. Arquilla and Ronfeldt have described the strategy as 'noopolitik' as opposed to state-centered realpolitik . The former involves the use of soft power to shape ideas, values, norms, laws, and ethics.[17]

Cultural and educational programs, such as the Fulbright program, seek to provide a deeper understanding of a country's society, values, institutions and motives for forming the positions it takes. While funding of arts and cultural exchange was a prominent part of the ideological battle between the US and USSR, support has declined since the end of the Cold War.[18]

Propaganda and the War on Terror

The United States' War on Terror is but one of the most recent iterations of the use of propaganda in conflict. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has used fundamentalist discourse dominated by the binaries of good-evil and security-peril as well as appealing to a missionary obligation to spread freedom, while at the same time not broaching dissent.[19] This has had some resonance with segments of the American population. However, in this era of globalization, bad news in Iraq have obstructed the message and it has also been received very differently abroad. The US military has also utilized the practice of embedding journalists, which the British first learned during the Falklands war could be an effective government strategy because it creates sympathy for the troops on the part of the journalist.[20]

Despite gaffs of referring to the War on Terror as a crusade, the administration quickly recognized the importance of shoring up its image around the world, and the Middle East in particular. Within a month of 9/11, Charlotte Beers, a pioneer of branding strategies who had previously led Ogilvy & Mather and J. Walter Thompson, two of the largest advertising firms in the world, was named to the post of Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Beers was later replaced by Karen Hughes. Upon Beers' appointment, Secretary of State Colin Powell described her role in these terms: "We are selling a product. There is nothing wrong with getting somebody who knows how to sell something. We need someone who can rebrand American policy"[21] The administration did just that, undertaking a "brand America" campaign in the Middle East. Amongst Beers' initiatives were a glossy brochure depicting the carnage of 9/11 and the "Shared Values" campaign that consisted of a series of short videos of Muslims describing their lives in the US. The latter portrayed an American egalitarian culture, that the US was wronged and a victim. The videos showed successful Muslims. They tried to enhance their authenticity by showing Muslims doing 'traditional' things. The US made a particularly concerted effort to reach young Arabs. Many argue that the use of public diplomacy can be an important tool to offer desperate youth, particularly in the Arab world, a compelling ideological alternative to extremism.[22] To the present, however, the American propaganda campaign has failed in Iraq on all four of Pratkanis and Aronson's counts.[23] To be effective, some argue for the importance of a greater recognition amongst policymakers and politicians that public diplomacy is a long-term effort. In addition, some have called for a strengthened agency that has independent reporting, an increased budget, as well as greater training.[24] There is also a need for better organization and a better articulation of an overarching strategy in the conduct of public diplomacy.[25]

Political Communication

Propaganda itself is a subcategory of political communication, which encompasses a wide range of communicative behaviors that have political ends. One element encompasses the conduct of an effective election campaign, to disseminate the candidate's message and to counter the message of one's opponents. Governments, too, employ various techniques, including as we have seen propaganda, to build support for policies and stifle dissent. Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model of the media[26] "depicts the media system as having a series of five successive filters through which the "raw material of news" must pass, leaving a "cleansed residue" of what "news is fit to print, marginaliz[ing] dissent, and allow[ing] the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public." In brief paraphrase, these filters are (a) a focus on profitability by an increasingly concentrated industry that has close ties to the government and is in a position by sheer volume to overwhelm dissenting media voices, (b) the dependence of these media organizations on funding through advertising, leading them to favor content likely to appeal to the affluent and making concessions to commercial sponsors, (c) the dependence of journalists who work for the media on information from sources that constitute, collectively, a powerful and prestigious establishment; (d) commercial interests that make the media vulnerable to "flak" and criticism from groups and institutions with the power to generate criticism and protest to which they respond with caution; and, finally, (e) "anticommunism" (or some ideological equivalent) that those who produce content have internalized, thus conjoining them to frame the news in a dichotomous fashion, applying one standard to those on "our" side and a quite different one to "enemies." Most recently, the "war against terrorism" has served as a non-ideological substitute…. The propaganda model assigns to the media system just one major function to which everything else is subordinate. That function is the "manufacture of consent" for government policies that advance the goals of corporations and preserve the capitalist system."[27]

Some argue that evolving communications technologies and advertising and marketing techniques are damaging democratic practice by replacing thoughtful discussion with simplistic soundbites and manipulative messages.[28] Campaigns play on our deepest fears and most irrational hopes with the result being that we have a skewed view of the world. That said, media effects on politics are not uniform around the world. Rather, they are the product of the types of media technologies, the structure of the media market, the legal and regulatory framework, the nature of political institutions, and the characteristics of individual citizens.[29] What is more, others argue, by contrast, that "blaming the messenger" overlooks deep-rooted flaws in the systems of representative democracy that are responsible for the sorry condition of political discussion.[30] There is also much discussion about whether the internet is a positive for American democracy.[31] With respect to often delicate peace processes, the role of the media in the Rwandan genocide has given the news media a tarnished reputation. However, in some instances, the news media has sometimes played a constructive role in sustaining peace efforts.[32]

[1] Lippmann, W. A Preface to Morals . New York: Macmillan, 1929. 281.

[2] Guilday, Peter. "The Sacred Congregation De Propaganda Fide." Catholic Historical Review 6. 480. See also: Jowett, Garth S. and Victoria O'Donnell. Propaganda and Persuasion . 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999. 72-73.

[3] Combs, J.E. and D. Nimmo. The New Propaganda: The Dictatorship of Palaver in Contemporary Politics . New York: Longman, 1993.

[4] Kimble, James J. "Whither Propaganda? Agonism and 'The Engineering of Consent'." Quarterly Journal of Speech 91.2 (May 2005).

[5] Link, Jurgen. "Fanatics, Fundamentalists, Lunatics, and Drug Traffickers: The New Southern Enemy Image." Cultural Critique 19 (Fall 1991): 33-53.

[6] Kimble, 203.

[7] Jowett, Garth S. and Victoria O'Donnell. Propaganda and Persuasion . 4th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006.

[8] For further discussion, see: Center for Media and Democracy. "Propaganda Techniques." < http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Propaganda-techniques> .

[9] Horten, Gerd. Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda During World War II . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.

[10] Cunningham, S.B. The Idea of Propaganda: A Reconstruction . Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.; Ellul, J. "The Ethics of Propaganda: Propaganda, Innocence and Amorality." Communication 6 (1981): 159-175.; Plaisance, Patrick Lee. 2005. "The Propaganda War on Terrorism: An Analysis of the United States' 'Shared Values' Public-Diplomacy Campaign After September 11, 2001." Journal of Mass Media Ethics 20.4 (2005): 250-268.

[11] Pratkanis, Anthony and Elliot Aronson. Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion . Owl Books, 2001.

[12] Deibert, R. "International Plug 'n' Play: Citizen Activism, the Internet and Global Public Policy." International Studies Perspectives 1.3 (2000): 255-272.; Rothkopf, D. "The Disinformation Age." Foreign Policy 114 (1999): 82-96.; Volkmer, I. News in the Global Sphere . Luton: University of Luton Press, 1999.

[13] Hoskins, Andrew. Televising War: From Vietnam to Iraq . London and New York: Continuum, 2004.

[14] Jowett and O'Donnell (2006), 270.

[15] U.S. Information Agency Alumni Association. "What is Public Diplomacy?" 1 Sep 2002. 2 Apr 2003. < http://www.publicdiplomacy.org/1.htm> .

[16] Ross, Christopher. "Pillars of Public Diplomacy." Harvard Review Aug 2003. Available at: < http://www.iwar.org.uk/news-archive/2003/08-21-3.htm> .

[17] Arquilla, J. and D. Ronfeldt. The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward an American Information Strategy . Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 1999. w13. < http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR 1033/ MR1033.pdf/MR1033.chap3.pdf>.

[18] Smith, Pamela. "What Is Public Diplomacy?" Address before the Mediterranean Academy of Diplomacy, Malta, 2000. < http://diplo.diplomacy.edu/Books/mdiplomacy-book/smith/p.h.%20smith.htm> .

[19] Domke, David. God Willing? Political Fundamentalism In The White House, The War On Terror And The Echoing Press . London: Pluto Press, 2004.

[20] Knightley, Philip. The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Iraq . London: André Deutsch, 2003.; Miller, David (ed.) Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq . London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2004.

[21] Klein, N. "The Problem is the U.S. Product." Seattle Post-Intelligencer 28 Jan 2003: B5.

[22] Finn, Helena K. "The Case for Cultural Diplomacy: Engaging Foreign Audiences." Foreign Affairs 82.6 (Nov-Dec 2003): 15.

[23] McKay, Floyd. "Propaganda: America's Psychological Warriors." The Seattle Times , 19 Feb 2006. < http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0219-24.htm> .

[24] Johnson, Stephen and Helle Dale. "How to Reinvigorate U.S. Public Diplomacy." The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder 1645 (23 Apr 2003). < http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/loader.cfm?url=/common... .

[25] GAO Report on Public Diplomacy. 2003. < http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d03951.pdf> .

[26] Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media . New York: Pantheon, 2002. Excepts of a previous edition available at < http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufac-Consent-Prop-Model.h... .

[27] Lang, Kurt and Gladys Engel Lang. "Noam Chomsky and the Manufacture of Consent for American Foreign Policy." Political Communication 21.93 (2004): 94.

[28] Bennett, W. Lance and Robert Entman (eds.) 2000. Mediated Politics: Communication in the Future of Democracy . Cambridge University Press, 2000.; Pratkanis, Anthony and Elliot Aronson. Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion . Owl Books, 2001.

[29] Gunther, Richard and Anthony Mughan (eds.) Democracy and the Media . Cambridge University Press, 2000.; Hallin, Daniel C. and Paolo Mancini. Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics . Cambridge University Press, 2004.

[30] Norris, Pippa. A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Post-Industrial Democracies . Cambridge University Press, 2000.

[31] Bimber, Bruce. Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power . Cambridge University Press, 2003.

[32] Wolfsfeld, Gadi. Media and the Path to Peace . Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Additional Resources

The intractable conflict challenge.

Our inability to constructively handle intractable conflict is the most serious, and the most neglected, problem facing humanity. Solving today's tough problems depends upon finding better ways of dealing with these conflicts.   More...

Selected Recent BI Posts Including Hyper-Polarization Posts

• Democracy Lighthouse + More on Communicating with Friends and Family -- Sharing several new ideas that have come to us recently on controlling affective polarization and threats to democracy from the family level on up.
• Massively Parallel Peace and Democracy Building Links for the Week of June 23, 2024 -- More useful and interesting reading from colleagues and others in allied fields.
• Democratic Subversion - Part 2 -- Part 2 of 2 newsletters looking at an old, but eerily accurate, description of political events in the United States over the last ten-twenty years, explaining why we are well on our way to a destroyed democracy and what we can do about it.

Get the Newsletter Check Out Our Quick Start Guide

Educators Consider a low-cost BI-based custom text .

Constructive Conflict Initiative

Join Us in calling for a dramatic expansion of efforts to limit the destructiveness of intractable conflict.

Things You Can Do to Help Ideas

Practical things we can all do to limit the destructive conflicts threatening our future.

Conflict Frontiers

A free, open, online seminar exploring new approaches for addressing difficult and intractable conflicts. Major topic areas include:

Scale, Complexity, & Intractability

Massively Parallel Peacebuilding

Authoritarian Populism

Constructive Confrontation

Conflict Fundamentals

An look at to the fundamental building blocks of the peace and conflict field covering both “tractable” and intractable conflict.

Beyond Intractability / CRInfo Knowledge Base

Home / Browse | Essays | Search | About

BI in Context

Links to thought-provoking articles exploring the larger, societal dimension of intractability.

Colleague Activities

Information about interesting conflict and peacebuilding efforts.

Disclaimer: All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Beyond Intractability or the Conflict Information Consortium.

Beyond Intractability 

Unless otherwise noted on individual pages, all content is... Copyright © 2003-2022 The Beyond Intractability Project c/o the Conflict Information Consortium All rights reserved. Content may not be reproduced without prior written permission.

Guidelines for Using Beyond Intractability resources.

Citing Beyond Intractability resources.

Photo Credits for Homepage, Sidebars, and Landing Pages

Contact Beyond Intractability    Privacy Policy The Beyond Intractability Knowledge Base Project  Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess , Co-Directors and Editors  c/o  Conflict Information Consortium Mailing Address: Beyond Intractability, #1188, 1601 29th St. Suite 1292, Boulder CO 80301, USA Contact Form

Powered by  Drupal

production_1

103 Propaganda Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for good propaganda topics to write about? This field is truly exciting and worth exploring!

🏆 Best Propaganda Topic Ideas

🔊 excellent propaganda essay examples, 👍 good propaganda essay topics, ❓ questions about propaganda.

In your propaganda essay, you might want to focus on the historical or ethical aspects of the issue. Another interesting option would be to focus on a particular case and discuss the effectiveness of propaganda. In this article, we’ve gathered a list of top propaganda topics to write about. They will suit for essays, research papers, speeches or other projects. We’ve also added some excellent propaganda essay examples to inspire you even more.

• Persuasion and Propaganda: Differences and Similarities In contrast to propaganda, persuasion is characterized by private acceptance of the position advocated in the message. In contrast to persuasion, propaganda is based on mind control aimed to condemn the recipients of a particular […]
• Political Propaganda in The Aeneid by Virgil As the paper reveals, The Aeneid is a political epic that was written with a political agenda to justify the founding of the nation of Rome.
• Propaganda During World War II The Second World War was a complicated time for both the general public and the authorities since while the former worried for their safety, family, and homeland, the latter needed to maintain the national spirit […]
• Propaganda in “Animal Farm” by George Orwell His greatest objective is to carry out the spreading of the revolution and to bring in the improvement of the general welfare of all the animals on the farm.
• French Revolution: Role of Propaganda and Music The history of propaganda is based on three interweaving fundamentals: first, the mounting need, with the growth of civilization and the rise of nation-state, to win the battle for people’s minds; second, the increasing sophistication […]
• Rhetoric and Propaganda: How Far Is Rhetoric From Propaganda? In order to understand the essence of the two terms, it is important to consider the available definitions and meanings assigned to rhetoric and propaganda in the modern world.
• Propaganda in the Democratic Society The article focuses on the effects of propaganda on the democracy. In the article, he focuses on his experiences in the media industry with respect to the past and the present news.
• Propaganda Techniques in the Vitaminwater Advertisement Applying this technique implies that an advertisement uses strong, attractive words and phrases to show how good a product is in order to attract the audience’s attention.
• Hitler’s Use of Propaganda and Fear-Mongering The establishment of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party led to the adoption of a properly coordinated propaganda campaign that would prepare the country for war.
• World War II Propaganda Posters in America The imagery of the boot stepping on the American church is not just a threat to the religious ideals of the country but a threat to freedom itself as the church often doubled as the […]
• World War II Propaganda and Its Effects The purpose of this paper is to examine the confrontation between the German and the Soviet propaganda machines during the period of the Second Patriotic War, outline the goals and purposes of each, and identify […]
• The World War II Propaganda Techniques All the parties to the war, including Germany, the Soviet Union, and Britain, invested many resources in propaganda, but the present essay will focus on the United States’ effort. Furthermore, propaganda messages were created to […]
• “The Motherland Calls”: Art as Political Propaganda The statue is meant to commemorate the Soviet victory in the Second World War, represent the soviet might, and serve as a message to all enemies of the USSR.
• Stereotypes and Propaganda in Society Analysis The unfortunate reality is that the propaganda onslaught is continuous and the gullibility of the audience is also too often and thus the thinking of the majority of the audience is corrupted on heavy scales.
• Propaganda Techniques in Advertising The end goal is to solidify the brand in the subconscious mind of the buyers, in order for it to be able to compete with other brands.
• History of Hitler’s Nazi Propaganda According to Hitler, the German’s defeat in the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, German’s post war inflation, and the economic crisis of the year 1929 were accredited to International Jewry. Over time, the masses […]
• Contribution of Media Text to World Wars’ Propaganda The key stakeholders in the industry prioritized profit maximization, hence amplifying the benefits of winning the war while minimally addressing the repercussions of the violence to the international community.
• Freedom of Speech and Propaganda in School Setting One of the practical solutions to the problem is the development and implementation of a comprehensive policy for balanced free speech in the classroom.
• The Role of Propaganda During World War II The poster encourages men to enroll in the army to protect the peaceful lives of women and children. By manipulating emotions and feelings, propaganda influenced people to enroll in the army or work harder.
• Nazi Propaganda and Triumph of the Will Based on this, the filming of the Triumph of the Will took place with the help of the vision of the world and the situation by the directors, omitting a number of significant events or […]
• Basic Propaganda Techniques The majority of the article is dedicated to Logos, however, presenting logical arguments and examples. When examples of negativity can be largely attributed only to one side, the folly occurs as follows: Subject A is […]
• Jim Crow Era Signage and Advertisements: Tools for Reinforcement a Racist Propaganda The quality of the services offered to “colored” people, It comes as no surprise, that all public facilities and spaces were segregated, particularly in the Southern states.
• The Use of Radio in German Propaganda During the World War II One of the techniques used by the Nazis to persuade German people and shape their worldview was the use of such media as radio.
• War on Terror: Propaganda and Freedom of the Press in the US There was the launching of the “Center for Media and Democracy”, CMD, in the year 1993 in order to create what was the only public interest at that period. There was expansive use of propaganda […]
• Medieval and Renaissance Art Religious Style and Propaganda The main task of these artworks was to inspire and awe the people, to show the greatness and almightiness of God.
• Is Propaganda a Technique or a Phenomenon? The main goal of this paper is to analyze the nature of propaganda to answer the question of whether it is a phenomenon or a technique.
• How to Control What People Do: “Propaganda” by Edward Bernays In the book, Bernays explains how he employed propaganda to manipulate the public when he was the head of the United States Department of public information during world war I.
• Commercial Advertisements as a Form of Propaganda System This is due to the fact that the objective of advertisement is to promote a product or service resulting in a financial benefit to the firm.
• Commercial Advertising as a Propaganda System The propaganda system is a commonly used tool of winning the attention of the audience and is mostly used in political circles although it has of late gained popularity in the business environment.
• Anti-Japanese Propaganda During World War II The content of propaganda was much the same as that of broadcast propaganda: emphasis on the Allies’ growing war potential, ridicule of the more preposterous assertions of the National Socialists, evidence of self-contradictions in the […]
• Propaganda in Art During the Second World War In the background of the Great Depression, and the Second World War this poster was the embodiment of the unification of generations, which takes place at the feast table.”The Four Freedoms” speech, proclaimed by Roosevelt […]
• Persuasion and Propaganda in Modern Society Persuasion is based on discourse and dialogue; propaganda is intended to be one-sided” Some researchers, such as Cain, look at any piece of media communication according to the ten points identified by Jowett and O’Donnell […]
• The Use of Propaganda in Political Campaigns The issue of propaganda is of current importance because we hear such words we can face propaganda in every sphere of human life: political campaigns, propaganda of healthy way of life, propaganda in the sphere […]
• The History of Propaganda: From the Ancient Times to Nowadays The history of propaganda shows that some means of encouraging the troops, or discouraging the enemy were undertaken in the ancient times, and the times have preserved and brought up the names of the greatest […]
• Nazi’s Propaganda in the XX Century At first, Nazis used propaganda technologies to draw attention of other political organizations of the right wing, then, after the departure of imprisonment by Hitler, the party becomes better organized and, finally, propaganda is used […]
• Anti-War Movement DADA Vs. Propaganda Posters of WWI In relation to the causes of the WWI, these can considered as pertinent specifically on the basis that the reasons can be related to the type of society that is present during the said era.
• The Power of Propaganda He is of the opinion that lies comprise the lion’s share of propaganda and describes it as a very powerful tool utilized in the arena of politics.
• Bolshevik Propaganda in the Russian Revolution Communists hoped to achieve, and that was why they had more and more concentrated their propaganda efforts on the boys and girls and the young men and women.
• Albert Speer’s Architectural Scale as a Tool of Nazi Propaganda In the center of attention of Hitler, there was the restructuring of Berlin by the architect Albert Speer. Such buildings as the Volkshalle and the Cathedral of Light were the most expressive projects that illustrated […]
• Terrorism as Spectacle: Extremist Propaganda The objective of terrorist propaganda is to influence the attitude of a specified mass audience. Terrorist propaganda in the video links is intended to publicize acts of brutality committed by the militants.
• Advertising: Rhetoric or Propaganda? The shorter video mainly features the executive director of the “Morningside Recovery” company, who might be described as an attractive person, which creates additional appeal in the viewers of the video; the director briefly outlines […]
• Propaganda: “Total” and “Time” Concepts The fact that the most outrageous instances of propaganda are never forgotten and stay in history brings us to the next aspect of the investigated phenomenon and technique, which is the “Time”.
• The Cyberspace War: Propaganda and Trolling To justify the theory that will be used in the study, it is necessary to state that the Russian government has been using the workforce of its employees to change people’s opinions to the ones […]
• American Government: Propaganda and Persuasion He successfully achieved his goal of sending a man to the Moon and managed to beat the Soviet Union mostly due to his ability to capture people’s imagination.
• Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Its Propaganda The Middle East also has a serious economic impact on the rest of the world because of the rich oil deposits, especially in the countries bordering the Persian Gulf.
• Holocaust, Antisemitism, and Propaganda That is why, nowadays great attention is given to issues which led to the death of millions of people. Being a part of the ideology of Nazism, it led to the elimination of a great […]
• Authoritarian Propaganda in Education and Media The question that people often ask themselves is, ‘how do authoritarian regimes get away with violence, torture, and oppression?’ Most of the citizens in countries led by authoritarians often seem to be in agreement with […]
• Islamic State’s Online Propaganda to Men and Women The third hypothesis is that the ISIS extensively uses misrepresentation as a tool of online communication, i.e.the way the role and position of women in the ISIS presented in the terrorists’ online communication are significantly […]
• Propaganda as a Social Phenomenon Edgar Henderson, also comprehensively in propaganda scholarship, argues that propaganda is basically a social phenomenon owing to its objectivity and capacity to appeal to the psychological or sociopsychological dispositions of individuals.
• Propaganda: Terrorist, Government, State, Non-State Extremists pass their terrorist propaganda to the youth through the power of the media and the internet. Ideally, propaganda that is produced by the state aims at influencing the opinions and attitudes of its people […]
• Terrorist and Government Propaganda in Media The aim of terrorists, especially those concerned with religious extremism, is to attract the attention of the state and other members of the public.
• Propaganda and Marketing Relationships This aspect was meant to prevent the wrong societal perceptions that Bernays was promoting Venida products in the market, but showing the public the importance of the hairnets.
• Propaganda of Adolf Hitler and Jim Jones This is a scenario that has occurred with the Nazi, under the command of Adolf Hitler, and the story of Jim Jones, and the people who followed him in a quest to build an ideal […]
• Propaganda Techniques in Movies: Light, Camera, Action Despite using rather simplistic propaganda techniques and devices, such as Beautiful People and Flag-Waving, the movie manages to get the key idea of the major flaws at the very core of the current healthcare system […]
• Propaganda Forms and Techniques They both target the anti-government group that is most likely to criticize and question the actions of the government. The policies of the government have been hijacked and are now in favor of the ruling […]
• Propaganda Model and Media Power The media is expected to expose any practices of the government and corporate bodies that may cause any harm to the public in one way or the other.
• Propaganda Movement in Mass Media Through the study of Gimenez et al, it was seen that the correlation between the propaganda model and the power of the media can be summarized on the impact of irrational exuberance as a means […]
• Influence of Propaganda Politics The organizers of the event were well conversant with the impact of the flag to the message; it created credibility and believability among the members of the public.
• The Marlboro Ads as a Propaganda Advertising As such, the target of information presented is to alter the attitudes of consumers towards the interests of the advert sponsors.
• Propaganda as Hezbollah’s Auxiliary Strategy These strategies include the construction of a propaganda theme park, the establishment of a Hezbollah television station, the development of anti-Israeli video games, and the production of varied merchandise that promote Hezbollah’s ideas and values.
• Why We Fight: American Wartime Propaganda The reason for this is simple contrary to what it is being suggested in the film, the overwhelming majority of German Nazis, as well as ordinary German citizens who never ceased supporting Nazis right to […]
• Propaganda, Persuasion and Public Relations For example in the case of the Australia’s cancellation of the Fuel Watch program Senator Xenaphon utilized propaganda stating that Fuel Watch was not an effective means of helping consumers stating the need to tackle […]
• Propaganda in Pro-slavery Arguments and Douglass’s Narrative Propaganda refers to the form of communication that is meant to influence the feelings and attitudes of individual to believe or support a certain viewpoint.
• Propaganda Model: Herman and Noam Chomsky In Chomsky’s opinion, the conclusion that the tyranny of the majority can threaten the rights of persons, including the rights for freedom of speech and conscience, was the result of confusion caused by the vague […]
• Al Jazeera TV: A Propaganda Platform Al Jazeera is the largest media outlet in the Middle East reporting events mostly to the Arab world. The media outlet has equated revolutions in Egypt and Libya with the ejection of totalitarianism in the […]
• Media Propaganda: Poster Advertisement Further, at the lower right corner, the poster has a picture of the spray under consideration and the name of the spray: “New Axe Essence”.
• Propaganda and Mass Media: Obstacles and Best Conditions for Propagandist The first obstacle is to comprehensively understand the nature of the target audience that the propagandist wants to modify through the use of propaganda.
• Propaganda in the “Triumph of the Will” This is propaganda because the development of Germany was not based on the efforts of the labor force alone, but also on all German citizens and the world at large. He is often heard saying […]
• What American Leader Relies on Propaganda and Appeals to Fear?
• How Did Hitler Consolidate His Power and Continue to Gain Support Using Propaganda?
• How Is Propaganda Used?
• How Effective Were Indoctrination and Propaganda?
• Did a Campaign of Propaganda and Disinformation Initiate the War in Iraq?
• How Did the Nazi Regime Use Propaganda as a Form of Political Control?
• What Makes a Good Propaganda?
• How Media and Propaganda Are Related?
• How Did the Nazi Party Use Propaganda?
• How Were Cartoons and Propaganda Used Against Jews and Nazis During World War II?
• How Did Propaganda Help the Nazis Control?
• What Role Did Printed Propaganda Play in the Outbreak and Continuation of Conflict During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms?
• How the Nazi Germans Used the Media to Spread Propaganda During Hitler’s Time?
• How Does Napoleon Use Persuasive Language and Propaganda to Seize and Maintain Power?
• Was Propaganda the Main Reason for the Lack of Opposition to the Nazis?
• How Have Images and Designs Been Used as Social Protest and Propaganda?
• How Effective Was Propaganda in Affecting the Way People Acted and Thought?
• Why Did the British Government Make Use of Propaganda During World War I?
• How Successful Was Propaganda in Indoctrinating Nazi Ideals?
• How Did Radio and Movies Change People’s Ideas, and How Were They Used for Spreading Propaganda?
• What Are Propaganda Historical Origins?
• What Is Propaganda in Psychology?
• How Propaganda Helped the Nazi Government to Control Germany?
• How Far Did Ancient Coinage Serve as a Medium for Political Propaganda?
• What Is Bandwagon in Propaganda?
• Why the Society Has to Co-exist With Propaganda?
• How Vital Was Propaganda to Nazi Control Over Germany in 1934-1939?
• How Important Was the Governments Use of Propaganda in Bringing the Strike to an Early End?
• How and Why Did the Nazis Use Propaganda to Further Their Aims 1929-1933?
• How Does Propaganda Work?
• Elections Essay Titles
• Public Relations Titles
• Public Safety Research Ideas
• Gun Control Titles
• Quality Control Research Topics
• Birth control Questions
• Dictatorship Topics
• Totalitarianism Questions
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, February 29). 103 Propaganda Essay Topics & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/propaganda-essay-topics/

"103 Propaganda Essay Topics & Examples." IvyPanda , 29 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/propaganda-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda . (2024) '103 Propaganda Essay Topics & Examples'. 29 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "103 Propaganda Essay Topics & Examples." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/propaganda-essay-topics/.

1. IvyPanda . "103 Propaganda Essay Topics & Examples." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/propaganda-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "103 Propaganda Essay Topics & Examples." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/propaganda-essay-topics/.

June 27, 2024

The Pentagon’s Antivaccine Propaganda Endangered Public Health and Tarnished U.S. Credibility

Amid the pandemic, the Pentagon ran a conspiracy campaign to discredit vaccines–just so it could score points against China. The revelation is a worst-case scenario for global public health

By Keith Kloor

Ground crew load packages of the first shipment of Sinovac Biotech Ltd. coronavirus vaccine onto a truck at the Villamor Airbase in Pasay City, Manila, the Philippines, on Sunday, Feb. 28, 2021.

Veejay Villafranca/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The battle against scientific misinformation has only grown tougher, as public health advocates will attest , with the rise of a poisonous, hydra-headed anti-vax movement . It s members include “natural health” scammers , shameless conspiracy mongers and misguided MAGA cultists bent on spurring vaccine mistrust. But they also include devious military minds schooled in the art of psychological warfare. Those last ones belong to the U.S. Department of Defense.

You may want to take a deep breath before reading on.

According to a June Reuters exposé , the Pentagon ran a secret antivaccine campaign in several developing countries at the height of the pandemic in 2020. Why? “To sow doubt about the efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China,” Reuters reported. Trump’s secretary of defense signed off on it; the Biden administration discontinued the program shortly after taking office. The Pentagon launched its propaganda operation in the Philippines (as COVID was raging), where it set up fake anti-vax accounts on social media. A military officer involved with the Pentagon’s psyop told Reuters: “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective. We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”

On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing . By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Such cavalier thinking has lethal consequences in the infodemic era . Timothy Caulfield, a University of Alberta public policy expert, put this bluntly in an interview with Scientific American : “The United States government made a conscious decision to spread misinformation that killed people.”

Is he being hyperbolic? Well, health experts are quite certain that antivaccine rhetoric proved deadly during the coronavirus pandemic and that, in the U.S., politicized misinformation led to COVID deaths in the hundreds of thousands . What fueled much of this antivaccine discourse? Conspiracy narratives about microchips and vaccine-risk cover-ups as well as other villainous plots to control humanity by governments or global institutions. Yes, it was bonkers . But now we know that when health authorities were desperately trying to tamp down these fears, the Pentagon was running its own conspiracy operation to discredit vaccines–just so it could score points against China. The revelation is a “worst case scenario story” for the global public health community, says Caulfield, “because it demonstrates that anti-vax misinformation was being spread by the government, and it reinforces people’s distrust in institutions.”

The fallout from the military’s covert psyop will reverberate on multiple levels. “When democratic governments employ this kind of information operation, they undermine the values and trust that sustain democracies,” says Kate Starbird, a disinformation expert at the University of Washington. Similarly the economist Alex Tabarrok writes that the Pentagon’s antivaccine campaign has “undermined U.S. credibility on the global stage and eroded trust in American institutions.” (No doubt, but the latter has been on a precipitous decline for a while.)

The question now is: What can be done to prevent something like this happening again? International development economist Charles Kenny says it’s time to “ban intelligence operations from interfering in public health.” That would be a welcome start, but let’s not hold our breath. We’ve been down this road before: In 2011, the CIA used a fake hepatitis vaccination program to search for Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. After the ploy came to light several years later, terrorists murdered legitimate polio vaccine workers, and there was a resurgence of polio in the population. In 2014 the White House vowed the CIA would no longer use vaccine programs as a cover for spy operations. Here we are a decade later, however, and it appears the Pentagon wasn’t bound by that promise and won’t be keeping it in the future.

The U.S. government’s past ignoble deceptions of its own citizens should have served plenty of warning that this is foolish. We owe today’s UFO craze to the cover-up of a military balloon crash in 1947, only acknowledged decades later by the U.S. Air Force. More seriously, during the cold war, the CIA secretly funded a slew of American cultural and political organizations to (unwittingly) help wage its propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union, promoting favored artists in commissar like fashion. Then U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell touted completely fallacious “weapons of mass destruction” buncombe to the United Nations to justify the botched invasion of Iraq in 2003. Now overlay this with the vaccine deceptions used by America’s spymasters in Pakistan and more recently in the Philippines. It makes for a confusing lens to view a world overrun with fake news, bots and troll armies.

John Lisle , a University of Texas historian who researches cold war science and the intelligence community, says that the Pentagon should have learned from history before undertaking its recent antivaccine disinformation campaign. “It may have been intended to make Filipinos distrust China, but its legacy will be to make Americans distrust the government.”

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American

• Entertainment
• Environment
• Information Science and Technology
• Social Issues

Home Essay Samples Sociology

Essay Samples on Propaganda

Propaganda and manipulation in george orwell's "1984".

George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984" offers a haunting portrayal of a society dominated by propaganda, where truth is distorted, and reality is manipulated by those in power. The novel explores the insidious nature of propaganda and its role in controlling thought, erasing history, and perpetuating...

Analysis Of The Anti-trump Statement In We The People Poster By Shepard Fairey

A propaganda is a mean of communication to influence others’ opinions to support a belief. In 1914, during World War 1, the word propaganda effectively came to use. Different types of propaganda were used to deliver different messages. In various propaganda, the American flag was...

• American Flag
• Donald Trump

Politics And American Propaganda In The Movie Casablanca

Casablanca is a 1942 Warner Brother classic which is near the top of the critical assessment of the best Hollywood movies of the all-time. Casablanca is more than a great movie and deals with topics head-on. It further deserves a lot more respect than it...

Ptolemaic Coinage as a Source of Propaganda

The minting of coinage during the Hellenistic period is a representation of propaganda that kings and queens used to establish themselves as the rulers of the rising successors kingdoms. The portrait representation of the Ptolemaic dynasty on coinage is a source of propaganda which was...

• Hellenistic Period

Messages of Political Propaganda in Advertising for Young Children

The definition of propaganda is about spreading information with a cause, whereas advertising is an attempt to influence the buying behaviour of customers or clients using a persuasive message. The similarity of both words is for the cause of spreading, even if it includes engraving...

• Advertising

Stressed out with your paper?

Consider using writing assistance:

• 100% unique papers
• 3 hrs deadline option

Ways to Combat the Fake News Issue and Stop It From Spreading

If I had to explain fake news to someone unfamiliar with the term, I might say something such as, it being misleading information or a piece of false information that has been manipulated and changed to fit an agenda. This type of news, is so...

• Media Influence

How Donald Trump Gained the Trust of His Voters Through Propaganda

Propaganda is information used by politicians and governments to portray an idea or to persuade people in a misleading and biased way. The creator of the propaganda focuses on the side that is beneficial for him and usually ignores the negative side. It is commonly...

• Trust in Presidency

Rosie the Riveter Empowers Women During World War II

Events in the past have shaped the minds of women from being housewives to holding higher paying jobs comparable to their male counterparts. The slogan, “We Can Do It!”, portrayed by Rosie the Riveter, inspired women during World War II to become more independent and...

• Rosie The Riveter

The Reality Behind Rosie The Riveter and Her Campaign in World War II

Rosie the Riveter was featured in the celebrated World War II era propaganda campaign battle and in the long run came a standout amongst the most renowned symbols in American history. But who precisely was Rosie the Riveter? But what is the real story behind...

Propaganda Process In Shepard Fairey'S Work

This essay will be discussing what it takes to create successful propaganda. Each paragraph will be delving into the creative process that is behind propaganda specifically the work of Shepard Fairey. Fairey has created multiple pieces of propaganda throughout the years ranging from his own...

• Barack Obama
• Exit Through The Gift Shop

The Difference Between Propaganda and Street Art in Shepard Fairey's Work

Shepard Fairey is a very influential graphic designer, who was born on February the 15th in 1970, in the state South Carolina, in the United States. He went to the idyllwild arts academy in Palm Springs, California in 1988. In 1992 he then got his...

Examining 'Supersize Me' and 'FatHead': Unveiling the Truth or Propaganda

The rising level of obesity in the United States of America over the past decade has led to an increase in both health and wellness promotions, and media attention. This has, of course, also caused elevated the level of controversy surrounding this issue, giving way...

• Documentary
• Super Size Me

Violent Propaganda of ISIS during War on Hamas

On January 4, 2018, ISIS declared war on Hamas via a propaganda video showing the execution of a man who ISIS claims worked with Hamas. They seem like similar groups and share core beliefs, but because of a few differences there are extreme tensions between...

Ways of American Propaganda during the Civil War

Propaganda is a form of persuasion that is aimed at influencing, manipulating and controlling the behaviors of people; usually towards a cause or position. Many trends of propaganda can be detected throughout world history. In 1939, Hitler used anti-semitism propaganda to help unite the country...

British War Propaganda During World War I

Propaganda is used worldwide by many of the world leaders to aid in the persuasion of their loyal citizens into doing what they would like. The term propaganda is defined by “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause...

• World History

The Unknowing War of Propaganda Within Cinematography

The year is 2035, a conflict between the U.S. and Russia has reached threatening levels with proxy wars littering the cities of the Middle East and Europe. Seeing this on the news alongside the daily escalation of conflict, the local theater seems like the only...

• American Government

The Norms of Mass Society Theory and Propaganda in Media

Mass society theory, which first appeared in the late nineteenth century, was the dominant theory of the 1920s. (Baran & Davis, 2002) It provided various basic assumptions about the individuals, the roles of media, and the nature of social changes. There were three major changes...

• Mass Communication

Fake News and Propaganda Have Real World Consequences

Mankind has always used propaganda throughout history, but none more relevant than with the use of the internet. As early as the World Wars to the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, fake news has had an impact on America. With the easy accessibility to information, fake...

Anti-Americanism of the Soviet Period in Russia

For a better understanding of the roots of the problem, it is better to know what happened before the bad opinion was established. Before the Second World War, in Decembrists period was opposition in Russia whose ideology preferences was on USA democracy regime. One of...

• Americanism

Documentary Propaganda in The Grapes of Wrath

The definition of propaganda, according to The Merriam-Webster dictionary is “ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause” (Merriam-webster.com, 2019). We can certainly say that Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath to further his cause, but did...

• Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Grapes of Wrath

Governmental Propaganda as per George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein

Introduction The term “propaganda” comes from Latin. Propaganda is always biased. It is a way of distributing information or conveying a message where the message is designed in such a way to make people feel in a certain way. It is a particular kind of...

• George W. Bush

Manipulation of Opinions with Propaganda

To understand how certain events took place in history, it is vital to look at the effect propaganda had and still has on its people. By definition, propaganda is the spreading of information that may be biased to promote or oppose one’s cause. In actuality,...

Propaganda as a History-Changing Tool of Power

One of the most commonly asked questions in relation to propaganda, is what is propaganda and how does it work? Propaganda can essentially be any form of biased or even misleading information that is spread through some form of mass media with the sole intention...

• Catholic Church

Political Propaganda On Social Media

Social media has became an omnipresent tool of the 21st century. Nowadays, it is being used for a various of reasons, such as networking with one another, entertainment purposes, marketing and for political reasons. The development of technologies has made it very accessible to disseminate...

• Political Philosophy

The Unjust Promote Their Aims About Bad And Good

In every place and time in the world, there are individuals who want to oppress others in order to get more power. Two of the most effective ways to do this is through words that do not consider the truth or even through physical intimidation....

• Sociological Perspective

Best topics on Propaganda

1. Propaganda and Manipulation in George Orwell’s “1984”

2. Analysis Of The Anti-trump Statement In We The People Poster By Shepard Fairey

3. Politics And American Propaganda In The Movie Casablanca

4. Ptolemaic Coinage as a Source of Propaganda

5. Messages of Political Propaganda in Advertising for Young Children

6. Ways to Combat the Fake News Issue and Stop It From Spreading

7. How Donald Trump Gained the Trust of His Voters Through Propaganda

8. Rosie the Riveter Empowers Women During World War II

9. The Reality Behind Rosie The Riveter and Her Campaign in World War II

10. Propaganda Process In Shepard Fairey’S Work

11. The Difference Between Propaganda and Street Art in Shepard Fairey’s Work

12. Examining ‘Supersize Me’ and ‘FatHead’: Unveiling the Truth or Propaganda

13. Violent Propaganda of ISIS during War on Hamas

14. Ways of American Propaganda during the Civil War

15. British War Propaganda During World War I

• Gender Roles
• National Honor Society
• Gender Stereotypes
• Cultural Identity
• Social Class
• Conversation
• Mahatma Gandhi

Need writing help?

You can always rely on us no matter what type of paper you need

*No hidden charges

100% Unique Essays

Absolutely Confidential

Money Back Guarantee

By clicking “Send Essay”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement. We will occasionally send you account related emails

You can also get a UNIQUE essay on this or any other topic

Thank you! We’ll contact you as soon as possible.

Definition and Examples of Propaganda

Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Propaganda is a form of psychological warfare that involves the spreading of information and ideas to advance a cause or discredit an opposing cause. 

In their book Propaganda and Persuasion (2011), Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell define propaganda as "the deliberate and systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist."

Pronunciation: prop-eh-GAN-da

Etymology: from the Latin, "to propagate"

Examples and Observations

• "Every day we are bombarded with one persuasive communication after another. These appeals persuade not through the give-and-take of argument and debate but through the manipulation of symbols and of our most basic human emotions. For better or worse, ours is an age of propaganda." (Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion , rev. ed. Owl Books, 2002)

Rhetoric and Propaganda

• "Rhetoric and propaganda, both in popular and academic commentary, are widely viewed as interchangeable forms of communication; and historical treatments of propaganda often include classical rhetoric (and sophistry ) as early forms or antecedents of modern propaganda (e.g., Jowett and O'Donnell, 1992. pp. 27-31)." (Stanley B. Cunningham, The Idea of Propaganda: A Reconstruction . Praeger, 2002)
• "Throughout the history of rhetoric, . . . critics have deliberately drawn distinctions between rhetoric and propaganda. On the other hand, evidence of the conflation of rhetoric and propaganda, under the general notion of persuasion, has become increasingly obvious, especially in the classroom, where students seem incapable of differentiating among the suasory forms of communication pervasive now in our heavily mediated society. . . .
• "In a society where the system of government is based, at least in part, on the full, robust, give-and-take of persuasion in the context of debate, this conflation is deeply troubling. To the extent that all persuasive activity was lumped together with 'propaganda' and given the 'evil connotation ' (Hummel & Huntress 1949, p. 1) the label carried, persuasive speech (i.e. rhetoric) would never hold the central place in education or democratic civic life it was designed to." (Beth S. Bennett and Sean Patrick O'Rourke, "A Prolegomenon to the Future Study of Rhetoric and Propaganda." Readings in Propaganda and Persuasion: New and Classic Essays , ed by Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell. Sage, 2006)

Examples of Propaganda

• "A massive propaganda campaign by the South Korean military drew an ominous warning from North Korea on Sunday, with Pyongyang saying that it would fire across the border at anyone sending helium balloons carrying anti-North Korean messages into the country. "A statement carried by the North’s official news agency said the balloon-and-leaflet campaign 'by the puppet military in the frontline area is a treacherous deed and a wanton challenge' to peace on the Korean Peninsula." (Mark McDonald, "N. Korea Threatens South on Balloon Propaganda." The New York Times , Feb. 27, 2011)
• "The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.
• "A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an 'online persona management service' that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world." (Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain, "Revealed: US Spy Operation That Manipulates Social Media." The Guardian , March 17, 2011)

ISIS Propaganda

• "Former US public diplomacy officials fear the sophisticated, social media-borne propaganda of the Islamic State militant group (Isis) is outmatching American efforts at countering it.
• "Isis propaganda runs the gamut from the gruesome video-recorded beheadings of journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff to Instagram photographs of cats with AK-47s, indicating a comfort Isis has with internet culture. A common theme, shown in euphoric images uploaded to YouTube of jihadi fighters parading in armored US-made vehicles captured from the Iraqi military, is Isis’s potency and success. . . .
• "Online, the most visible US attempt to counter to Isis comes from a social media campaign called Think Again Turn Away, run by a State Department office called the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications." (Spencer Ackerman, "Isis's Online Propaganda Outpacing US Counter-Efforts." The Guardian , September 22, 2014)

The Aims of Propaganda

• "The characteristic that propaganda is a form of mass media argumentation should not, in itself, be regarded as sufficient for drawing the conclusion that all propaganda is irrational or illogical or that any argument used in propaganda is for that reason alone fallacious. . . .
• "[T]he aim of propaganda is not just to secure a respondent's assent to a proposition by persuading him that it is true or that it is supported by propositions he is already committed to. The aim of propaganda is to get the respondent to act, to adopt a certain course of action, or to go along with and assist in a particular policy. Merely securing assent or commitment to a proposition is not enough to make propaganda successful in securing its aim." (Douglas N. Walton, Media Argumentation: Dialectic, Persuasion, and Rhetoric . Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Recognizing Propaganda

• "The only truly serious attitude . . . is to show people the extreme effectiveness of the weapon used against them, to rouse them to defend themselves by making them aware of their frailty and their vulnerability instead of soothing them with the worst illusion, that of a security that neither man's nature nor the techniques of propaganda permit him to possess. It is merely convenient to realize that the side of freedom and truth for man has not yet lost, but that it may well lose--and that in this game, propaganda is undoubtedly the most formidable power, acting in only one direction (toward the destruction of truth and freedom), no matter what the good intentions or the goodwill may be of those who manipulate it." (Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes . Vintage Books, 1973)
• What Is a Rhetorical Device? Definition, List, Examples
• Definition of Spin in Propaganda
• Definition and Examples of Dialectic in Rhetoric
• What Is Astroturfing in Politics? Definition and Examples
• Definition and Examples of the New Rhetorics
• Propositions in Debate Definition and Examples
• Rhetoric: Definitions and Observations
• Definition and Examples of Ethos in Classical Rhetoric
• Persuasion and Rhetorical Definition
• What Is Phronesis?
• What Is a Sermon?
• Definition and Examples of Anti-Rhetoric
• What Is Rhetoric?
• An Introduction to Psychological Warfare
• Proof in Rhetoric
• Logos (Rhetoric)

• Games & Quizzes
• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction & Top Questions
• Connotations of the term propaganda
• Related terms
• Signs, symbols, and media used in contemporary propaganda
• Early commentators and theories

Modern research and the evolution of current theories

• Present and expected conditions in the world social system
• Present and expected conditions in subsystems
• Propagandists and their agents
• Selection and presentation of symbols
• Media of propaganda
• The reactors (audiences)
• Measurement of the effects of propaganda
• Countermeasures by opponents
• Measures against countermeasures
• Democratic control of propaganda
• Authoritarian control of propaganda
• World-level control of propaganda

• How did Joseph Goebbels rise to power in the Nazi Party?
• How did Joseph Goebbels affect the Nazi movement?
• Why was Adolf Hitler significant?
• How did Adolf Hitler rise to power?
• Why did Adolf Hitler start World War II?

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Literary Devices - Propaganda
• American Historical Association - What is Propaganda?
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - What is Propaganda?
• propaganda - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

After the decline of the ancient world, no elaborate systematic study of propaganda appeared for centuries—not until the Industrial Revolution had brought about mass production and raised hopes of immensely high profits through mass marketing . Near the beginning of the 20th century, researchers began to undertake studies of the motivations of many types of consumers and of their responses to various kinds of salesmanship, advertising , and other marketing techniques. From the early 1930s on, there have been “consumer surveys” much in the manner of public opinion surveys. Almost every conceivable variable affecting consumers’ opinions, beliefs, suggestibilities, and behaviour has been investigated for every kind of group, subgroup, and culture in the major capitalist nations. Consumers’ wants and habits were studied for a limited time in the same ways in the socialist countries—partly to promote economic efficiency and partly to prevent political unrest. Data on the wants and habits of voters as well as consumers are now being gathered in the same elaborate ways in many parts of the world. Beginning in the early 21st century, many Web sites (especially social networking platforms) and Internet service providers , as well as thousands of applications developed for use with browsers and smartphones , collected massive amounts of personal data about the consumers who used them, generally without their informed consent. Such data potentially included consumers’ ages, genders, marital status, medical histories, employment histories and other financial information, personal and professional interests, political affiliations and opinions, and even geographic locations on a minute-by-minute basis. The collected data was then sold to information or data brokers, who aggregated it and sold it to advertising firms, who in turn used it to identify potential customers for their corporate clients and to make their commercial messages more effective.

Large quantities of such information were also collected about voters and drawn upon for nationwide political advertising campaigns costing billions of dollars annually. Such messages have taken up a high percentage of advertising space or time on social networking platforms and other popular Web sites, in newspapers and magazines (both electronic and printed), and on radio and television. Critics have argued that advertising expenditures on such a scale, whether for deodorants or presidents, tend to waste society’s resources and also to preclude effective competition by rival producers or politicians who cannot raise equally large amounts of money. A rising tide of consumer resistance and voter skepticism has led to various attempts at consumer education , voter education, counterpropaganda, and proposals for regulatory legislation. Most such proposals in the United States have been unavailing.

As far back as the early 1920s, there developed an awareness among many social critics that the extension of the vote and of enlarged purchasing power to more and more of the ignorant or ill-educated meant larger and larger opportunities for both demagogic and public-spirited propagandists to make headway by using fictions and myths , utopian appeals, and “the noble lie.” Interest was aroused not only by the lingering horror of World War I and of the postwar settlements but also by publication of Ivan Pavlov ’s experiments on conditioned reflexes and of analyses of human motivations by various psychoanalysts. Sigmund Freud ’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922) was particularly relevant to the study of leaders, propagandists, and followers, as were Walter Lippmann ’s Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925).

In 1927, an American political scientist, Harold D. Lasswell , published a now-famous book, Propaganda Technique in the World War , a dispassionate description and analysis of the massive propaganda campaigns conducted by all the major belligerents in World War I. This he followed with studies of communist propaganda and of many other forms of communication. Within a few years, a great many other social scientists, along with historians, journalists, and psychologists, were producing a wide variety of publications purporting to analyze military, political, and commercial propaganda of many types. During the Nazi period and during World War II and the subsequent Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union , a great many researchers and writers, both skilled and unskilled, scholarly and unscholarly, were employed by governments, political movements, and business firms to conduct propaganda. Some of those who had scientific training designed very carefully controlled experiments or intelligence operations, attempting to quantify data on appeals of various types of propaganda to given reactors.

In the course of this theory building and research, the study of propaganda advanced a long way on the road from lore to science. By the second half of the 20th century, several hundred more or less scholarly books and thousands of articles had shed substantial light on the psychology , techniques, and effects of propaganda campaigns, major and minor.

Eventually nearly every significant government , political party , interest group , social movement , and large business firm in the advanced countries developed its own corps of specialized researchers, propagandists, or “opinion managers” (sometimes referred to as information specialists, lobbyists, legislative representatives, or vice presidents in charge of public relations ). Some have become members of parliaments, cabinets, and corporate boards of directors. The most expert among them sometimes are highly skilled or trained, or both, in history , psychiatry , politics, social psychology , survey research, and statistical inference .

Many of the bigger and wealthier propaganda agencies conduct (overtly and covertly) elaborate observations and opinion surveys, among samples of the leaders, the middle strata, and the rank and file of all social groups, big and little, whom they hope to influence. They tabulate many kinds of data concerning those contents of the Internet, the press, films, television, and organizational media that reach given groups. They chart the responses of reactors, through time, by statistical formulas. They conduct “symbol campaigns” and “image-building” operations with mathematical calculation, using large quantities of data. To the ancient art of rhetoric , the “technique of orators,” have been added the techniques of the psychopolitical analyst and the media specialist and the know-how of the administrators of giant advertising agencies, public relations firms, and governmental ministries of information that employ armies of analytic specialists and “symbol-handlers.”

It is a commonplace among the highly educated that people in the mass—and even people on high educational and social levels—often react more favourably to utopian myths, wishful thinking, and nonrational residues of earlier experiences than they do to the sober analysis of facts. Unfortunately, average citizens who may be aware of being duped are not likely to have enough education, time, or economic means to defend themselves against the massive organizations of opinion managers and hidden persuaders. Indeed, to affect them they would have to act through large organizations themselves and to use, to some extent, the very means used by those they seek to control. The still greater “curse of bigness” that may evolve in the future is viewed with increasing concern by many politically conscious people.

Essay Service Examples Sociology Propaganda

Essay on Propaganda and Rumors: Analysis of Their Impacts on Society

• Proper editing and formatting
• Free revision, title page, and bibliography
• Flexible prices and money-back guarantee

Introduction

What is propaganda, examples of propaganda:.

• Any sort of advertisement is propaganda used to promote a product or service. For example, an ad that promotes one deodorant brand over another is a case in point of propaganda.
• Political posters and advertisements are a case in point for misinformation. These support one candidate in the campaign, and his opinions on others.
• Many kinds of misinformation are generated by Government. Some type of advertisements from the public sector on safe living may be called propaganda.

Propaganda Techniques:

• Name Calling: Propagandists use this tactic to generate anxiety and excite hatred by using derogatory terms (bad names) to establish an adverse impression or dislike against a community, views, ideals or organizations that they will have us condemn. This method requires a conclusion without looking into the evidence. Name Calling is used as a replacement for arguing about the merits of an idea , belief, or proposal.
• Glittering Generalities: Propagandists use vague, sweeping statements (often slogans or simple catchphrases) that use language associated with values and beliefs deeply held by the audience without providing information or reason to support them. They appeal to ideas like pride, honor, country love, wish for harmony, equality, and ideals of the nation. The terms and phrases are ambiguous and mean different things to different people, but there is still a positive meaning. It can't mean true or wrong because it's just saying nothing or nothing.
• Transfer: Change is a tactic used to hold the legitimacy and acceptance of something that we admire and gratitude for something that the propagandist will have us embrace. Propagandists also use gestures (e.g., raising the flag) to stir our passions and earn our support.
• Testimonial: This tactic is used by propagandists to persuade a reputable figure or someone with experience to support a commodity or cause by giving it their approval stamp in the expectation that the target audience will follow their example.
• Plain Folks: This approach is used by propagandists to convince the audience that the spokesperson is from humble origins, someone they can trust, and one who has their interests at heart. In order to reach the audience and identify with their point of view, propagandists have the speaker use common language and mannerisms.
• Bandwagon: Propagandists use this technique to convince the crowd to follow. This device creates a widespread supportive impression. It strengthens the human will to be on the winning side. It also plays into feelings of isolation and loneliness. The implication is that if you don't jump on the bandwagon the parade will pass you by. While this is contrary to the other method, it has the same effect: getting the audience to join in with the crowd. Propagandists use this tactic to convince those who are not currently in the bandwagon to follow a mass campaign while ensuring at the same time that those on or partly on will stay aboard. Propaganda bandwagon took on a new twist. Propagandists are now trying to convince the target public that they will be left out if they don't join.
• Card Stacking: Propagandist employs this tactic to make the best arguments on his perspective and the worst arguments for the opponent's point of view feasible by deliberately presenting only the evidence that help his side of the debate when attempting to persuade the listener to embrace the evidence as an inference. The propagandist stacks the cards against the facts, in other words. Card stacking is the most difficult method to spot, as it does not supply the listener with all the details available to make an educated decision. It is up to the public to determine what is missing.

What effects does propaganda have on society?

Initial effects:, intended effects:.

• Mis-information: It is the false information that is shared accidentally and without aiming to cause harm.
• Dis-information: It is information intended to cause harm, by consciously sharing false information.
• Mal-information: It is the information or opinion shared aiming to cause harm, e.g. hate speech, harassment.
• Automated tackling of disinformation BY European Parliament – March 2019. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2019/624278/EPRS_STU(2019)624278_EN.pdf
• What is Propaganda BY Megaessays.com https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/28403.html
• How Propaganda is used in Advertising Media BY UKessays. https://www.ukessays.com/essays/media/how-propaganda-is-used-in-advertising-media-essay.php
• Propaganda BY Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
• 7 types of propaganda techniques advertisers use BY CANZ MARKETING. https://www.canzmarketing.com/7-types-of-propaganda-techniques-advertisers-use/

Our writers will provide you with an essay sample written from scratch: any topic, any deadline, any instructions.

Cite this paper

Related essay topics.

Get your paper done in as fast as 3 hours, 24/7.

Related articles

Most popular essays

• Animal Farm

Animal Farm by George Orwell, was first published in England on 17 August 1945. It is primarily...

• American Sniper
• Film Analysis

‘American Sniper’ is based and inspired by a book with the same title, as well as taken...

• American History

In the time known as the Roaring 20’s the US went through a great social and economic change. From...

• Critical Thinking
• French Revolution

The image chosen is illustrated by James Gillray, the image is named ‘Presages of the Millenium,...

• Advertisement
• Critical Reflection

Propaganda use in media is far from a new phenomenon in our society. Throughout this course, we’ve...

• Boston Massacre

The American Revolution didn’t start overnight, it was a very long and strenuous surpassing of...

• World War 2

This essay probes to find out the different roles that propaganda undertook during WW2. America...

• Hannah Arendt

In today’s world, the idea of totalitarianism and the mechanisms by which it is achieved seemed to...

• Dictatorship

Throughout literature, there’s always going to be a villain in the story. In Julia Alvarez’s, “In...

Join our 150k of happy users

• Get original paper written according to your instructions
• Save time for what matters most

Fair Use Policy

EduBirdie considers academic integrity to be the essential part of the learning process and does not support any violation of the academic standards. Should you have any questions regarding our Fair Use Policy or become aware of any violations, please do not hesitate to contact us via [email protected].

We are here 24/7 to write your paper in as fast as 3 hours.

Provide your email, and we'll send you this sample!

By providing your email, you agree to our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy .

Say goodbye to copy-pasting!

Get custom-crafted papers for you.

Enter your email, and we'll promptly send you the full essay. No need to copy piece by piece. It's in your inbox!

Special Issue: Propaganda

This essay was published as part of the Special Issue “Propaganda Analysis Revisited”, guest-edited by Dr. A. J. Bauer (Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism and Creative Media, University of Alabama) and Dr. Anthony Nadler (Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Media Studies, Ursinus College).

Propaganda Analysis Revisited

This special issue is designed to place our contemporary post-truth impasse in historical perspective. Drawing comparisons to the Propaganda Analysis research paradigm of the Interwar years, this essay and issue call attention to historical similarities between patterns in mass communication research then and now. The hope is that contemporary misinformation studies scholars can learn from and avoid the pitfalls that have historically faced propaganda researchers. Placing research on propaganda in historical context offers one way of counterbalancing the depoliticizing tendencies that can be found in contemporary misinformation studies. It provides a wider field of vision, and calls attention to the contingency of the very concepts that social scientists use to frame their surveys and interviews, code their content, and ground their analysis.

Department of Journalism and Creative Media, University of Alabama, USA

Department of Communication and Media Studies, Ursinus College, USA

The long post-truth impasse

In 2016, the U.S. presidential and U.K. Brexit elections shook global confidence in a universally shared sense of objective reality and its capacity to serve as a basic standard of political judgment. Trump’s surprise victory, in particular, sparked panic among journalists, some of whom openly worried whether the press had been “mortally wounded” (Pilkington, 2016). That year, Oxford Dictionaries declared ‘post-truth’ — an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” — as its word of the year (Oxford Languages, 2016). 

While Oxford traces the term’s etymology back only to 1992, the conditions that ‘post-truth’ denotes have been a source of scholarly inquiry, media activism, and political struggle throughout the Twentieth Century and now well into the Twenty-First. Concerns over propaganda, and the public’s susceptibility to it, have been omnipresent in the U.S. and Europe since at least the Interwar Period and have played a crucial role in structuring the United States’ central ideological and partisan binary ever since (Gary, 1999; Bauer, 2017). They also played a foundational role in establishing the academic discipline of mass communication studies. 

As historian J. Michael Sproule has shown, the propaganda anxieties that emerged in the aftermath of the First World War produced a fledgling scholarly paradigm known as Propaganda Analysis (Sproule, 1997). Between 1919 and 1937, an interdisciplinary array of humanists, educators, and social scientists produced countless studies focused on how to identify, understand, and defuse propaganda messages. This scholarly trend was bolstered by countless funders, and even supported by the then newly formed Social Science Research Council. It was also, Sproule contends, a fundamentally progressive endeavor — non-partisan, but driven by a “reform-minded probing into social institutions and persuasive campaigns to find whose interests were being advanced, how, and with what effect for society” (Sproule, 1987).

Propaganda Analysis faltered during the run-up to the Second World War. By the dawn of the Cold War, it had been eclipsed by a new communication research paradigm, typified by Paul Lazarsfeld’s more “limited” theory of media effects (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944). This new paradigm was focused less on the imperatives of social progress than on methodological sophistication and practical utility to government agencies and commercial interests. Propaganda Analysis lingered in the right anti-communist fringe, and among a tight-knit cadre of anti-capitalist activist scholars, but it became a marginal concern within the social sciences.

Like the Interwar years, our “post-truth era” has been a boon for scholars of propaganda, misinformation, and right-wing media around the globe, as funders and publishers rushed to fill perceived gaps in the scholarly literature. This has yielded a bumper crop of astute studies of our present political communication conjuncture. Research institutes such as Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and the Data & Society Research Institute, have led the way in producing cutting-edge, solutions-driven scholarship with an eye toward practical applicability and public engagement. 

Yet, some of the depoliticizing tendencies of the “communication research” paradigm linger. As Yochai Benkler and his colleagues noted in their pathbreaking study  Network Propaganda , explanations for our current post-truth era have tended to foreground foreign subversion or technological determinist narratives — blaming Russian operatives, or Macedonian teenagers, or algorithms, or filter bubbles, or echo chambers (Benkler et al., 2018). When these phenomena are used to provide “nonpartisan explanations” for a surge in the spread of misinformation and the causes of the legitimacy crisis facing established news institutions, it obscures the political stakes of our present political communication impasse. Too much focus on technical fixes or on thwarting a narrowly defined set of “bad actors” blunts the imperative for civic engagement in crafting media policies and building media institutions to serve democratic needs (Pickard 2019; Crain & Nadler, 2019). 

Historicizing propaganda research

Placing research on propaganda in historical context offers one way of counterbalancing the depoliticizing tendencies that can be found in contemporary misinformation studies. It provides a wider field of vision, and calls attention to the contingency of the very concepts that social scientists use to frame their interviews, code their content, and ground their analysis. Raymond Williams once lamented the tendency in social science to reduce systems to “fixed forms.” He astutely noted that social structures and processes only appear fixed artificially or in hindsight — social experiences are in fact lived “in solution” (Williams, 1977, p. 133).

Historical analysis can provide context that demonstrates how apparently coherent social processes — which are sometimes fixed in concepts like “propaganda,” “misinformation,” “echo chambers,” “the news ecosystem,” or even “journalism” — are dynamic, shaped in dialogue with broader political common sense and its path determined by established understandings of prior historical phenomena (Bauer, 2018; Nadler, 2019). Historical analysis, as applied to misinformation studies, need not be reduced to any one method — it may rely upon archival research, but it need not be confined to it. Comparative historical analysis invites a reflexive dialogue between how a phenomenon has been characterized in past iterations (based upon comparable prior examples) and how it is experienced in a given historical conjuncture. 

This raises the question: How do misinformation studies of today relate to the propaganda studies of the Interwar era and of the latter Twentieth Century? The authors in this issue make a case for the history of propaganda research as something more than an antiquarian curiosity. History cannot provide easy answers to present questions or solve our contemporary dilemmas. But it can illuminate some of the particularity of present assumptions and might help to recover ideas and frameworks that could prove productive today. For instance, in the years following the Second World War, researchers including Löwenthal and Guterman (1949) and Adorno (1951) articulated a framework for propaganda research that connected the potential power of propaganda within a historical moment to the emotional longings cultivated by prevailing social conditions. Reexamining this approach might push current misinformation scholars to consider a broader array of models for explaining the “pull” factors in the popular uptake of misinformation. Instead of only looking at supposedly universal cognitive tendencies like confirmation bias, which have been at the forefront of contemporary research, revisiting thinkers like Löwenthal, Gutman, and Adorno could inspire more investigation of socially conditioned dispositions that might shape the demand-side of propaganda. 

Just as important as rediscovering productive concepts that have been forgotten, rigorous historical examination forces us to scrutinize familiar tales about the past that are folded into contemporary self-understandings. Some fields burnish a flattering image of past contributions to cast a positive light on present-day inheritors. This is not the dominant trend in the field of misinformation studies, which has largely distanced itself from the history of propaganda research rather than claiming it as a legacy. Certainly, there are some compelling reasons for the field’s name change, including a sense that “misinformation” covers a wider object of analysis than does “propaganda.” But misinformation studies scholars will do themselves no favors if they remember only a caricature of propaganda research so as to inflate the new field’s confidence in overcoming the narrow-minded blunders of its predecessors. For example, that earlier propaganda researchers tended to rely on their own sensibilities to intuitively identify their objects of analysis (Bauer, 2017, 2018; Anderson, this issue) might be recognized as not only a cautionary tale, but as an ongoing tension in contemporary research.

One distorted memory of propaganda research that has been especially influential in the field of communication — and remains prevalent today, despite repeated debunking — is that such research figured ordinary people as gullible dupes and presented media influence as a “magic bullet.” This rendering served as a straw figure, designed to promote a more positivistic approach to studying media influence and which raised fewer ethical questions that could nettle the institutions that helped fund the ascendant communication research paradigm (Sproule 1989; Lubken 2008). Writing off earlier propaganda research as misguided by a fundamental error — one betraying elitist prejudice — diminished scholarly engagement with the complicated questions this earlier discourse raised. 

As several of the contributors in this issue argue (see especially works by Jeffrey Pooley and Victor Pickard), communication research turned away from squarely facing the normative questions this research started to raise, especially regarding the structural — and political — underpinnings of media systems that created conditions ripe for propaganda. Reconsidering the history of this research in light of our contemporary post-truth impasse can bring new life to the normative questions and debates that had been kept shuttered away from institutionally funded media research. 

Our point of departure, Interwar Propaganda Analysis in the United States and Europe, offers but one vantage into the long and variegated history of propaganda research — a limiting one, at that. It foregrounds the experiences and concerns of the Global North. While these contexts played an outsized role in the development of mass communication studies around the world, they have often failed to address or adequately explain propaganda in the Global South, as issue contributor Aman Abhishek deftly illustrates. U.S.-based Propaganda Analysis also tends to de-emphasize state-oriented solutions to dis- and misinformation (like those explored in this issue by Sonia Robles) — a relic not only of general U.S. anti-statism, but of the field’s roots in opposition to the abuses of the Woodrow Wilson administration’s Committee on Public Information during the First World War. 

The history of propaganda research, like that of propaganda itself, is vexed, non-linear, and over-determined. For this issue, we’ve selected case studies designed to illuminate research trajectories and counter-propaganda methods that resonate with challenges faced in our contemporary situation of post-truth impasse/global pandemic. Most of these studies offer visions of paths untaken or foreclosed, of approaches marginalized or diminished. Our hope is that scholars of contemporary dis- and misinformation will consider their work in relation to this long tradition of propaganda scholarship, to recognize it as a site of struggle with lessons for the present. 

• / Propaganda

Cite this Essay

Bauer, A. J., & Nadler, A. M. (2021). Propaganda Analysis Revisited. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review .

Bibliography

Adorno, T. W. (1951). Freudian theory and the pattern of Fascist propaganda. In J. M. Bernstein (Ed.). The culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture (2nd ed., 2001). Routledge.

Bauer, A. J. (2017). Before ‘fair and balanced’: Conservative media activism and the rise of the New Right [Unpublished dissertation]. New York University.

Bauer, A. J. (2018). Journalism History and Conservative Erasure. American Journalism 35 (1), 2-26. https://doi.org/10.1080/08821127.2017.1419750

Benkler, Y., Faris, R., & Roberts, H. (2018). Network propaganda: Manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics . Oxford University Press.

Crain, M., & Nadler, A. (2019). Political manipulation and internet advertising infrastructure. Journal of Information Policy, 9,  370–410. https://doi.org/10.5325/jinfopoli.9.2019.0370

Gary, B. (1999). The nervous liberals: Propaganda anxieties from World War I to the Cold War . Columbia University Press.

Lazarsfeld, P. F., Berelson, B., & Gaudet, H. (1944). The people’s choice: How the voter makes up his mind in a Presidential campaign . Columbia University Press.

Löwenthal, L., & Guterman, N. (1949). Prophets of deceit: A study of the techniques of the American agitator . Harper & Brothers.

Lubken, D. (2008). Remembering the straw man: The travels and adventures of hypodermic. In D. W. Park & J. Pooley (Eds.), The history of media and communication research: Contested memories . Peter Lang.

Nadler, A. M. (2019). Nature’s economy and news ecology. Journalism Studies, 20 (6), 823–839. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2018.1427000

Oxford Languages. (2016). Word of the year 2016 . Oxford University Press. https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/

Pickard, V. W. (2019). Democracy without journalism? Confronting the misinformation society . Oxford University Press.

Pilkington, E. (2016). Did Trump’s scorched-earth tactics mortally wound the media? Columbia Journalism Review . https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumps_tactics_wound_the_media.php

Sproule, J. M. (1987) Propaganda studies in American social science: The rise and fall of the critical paradigm. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 73 , 60–78, 67. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335638709383794

Sproule, J. M. (1989). Progressive propaganda critics and the magic bullet myth. Critical Studies in Media Communication , 6 (3), 225–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295038909366750

Sproule, J. M. (1997).  Propaganda and democracy: The American experience of media and mass persuasion . Cambridge University Press.

Williams, R. (1977). Structures of feeling. In Marxism and literature (pp. 128–135). Oxford University Press.

• Teaching Resources
• Upcoming Events
• On-demand Events

The Power of Propaganda

Published: March 12, 2018

• facebook sharing
• email sharing

At a Glance

• Social Studies
• The Holocaust

About This Lesson

In the previous lesson, students were introduced to the Nazis’ idea of a “national community” shaped according to their racial ideals, and the way the Nazis used laws to define and then separate those who belonged to the “national community” from those who did not. In this lesson, students will continue this unit’s historical case study by considering the nature of propaganda and analyzing how the Nazis used media to influence the thoughts, feelings, and actions of individuals in Germany. While the Nazis used propaganda as a tool to try to condition the German public to accept, if not actively support, all of their goals (including rearmament and war), this lesson focuses specifically on how they used propaganda to establish “in” groups and “out” groups in German society and cultivate their ideal “national community.” After carefully analyzing several propaganda images created by the Nazis, students will consider the ways in which this material influenced individuals, and they will be encouraged to consider how the effects of propaganda are more complicated than simple brainwashing.

Essential Questions

Unit Essential Question: What does learning about the choices people made during the Weimar Republic, the rise of the Nazi Party, and the Holocaust teach us about the power and impact of our choices today?

Guiding Questions

• How did the Nazis use propaganda to influence individuals’ attitudes and actions and to cultivate public support for their idea of a “national community”?
• How do explicit and implicit messages in the media (including television, the internet, film, radio, etc.) influence people’s beliefs, feelings, and actions? 

Learning Objectives

• Students will analyze several examples of Nazi propaganda to determine how it communicates powerful messages about who should be included in and who should be excluded from German society.
• Students will recognize that the effects of propaganda are more complex than simple brainwashing, and that Hitler succeeded because many German people shared some of the beliefs that were transmitted through Nazi propaganda.

What's Included

This lesson is designed to fit into two 50-min class periods and includes:

• 7 activities
• 3 teaching strategies
• 2 assessments
• 3 extension activities

Additional Context & Background

Propaganda—information that is intended to persuade an audience to accept a particular idea or cause, often by using biased material or by stirring up emotions—was one of the most powerful tools the Nazis used to consolidate their power and cultivate an “Aryan national community” in the mid-1930s.

Hitler and Goebbels did not invent propaganda. The word itself was coined by the Catholic Church to describe its efforts to discredit Protestant teachings in the 1600s. Over the years, almost every nation has used propaganda to unite its people in wartime. Both sides of  World War I used propaganda , for example. But the Nazis were notable for making propaganda a key element of government even before Germany went to war again. One of Hitler’s first acts as chancellor was to establish the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, demonstrating his belief that controlling information was as important as controlling the military and the economy. He appointed Joseph Goebbels as director. Through the ministry, Goebbels was able to penetrate virtually every form of German media, from newspapers, film, radio, posters, and rallies to museum exhibits and school textbooks, with Nazi propaganda.

Whether or not propaganda was truthful or tasteful was irrelevant to the Nazis. Goebbels wrote in his diary, "No one can say your propaganda is too rough, too mean; these are not criteria by which it may be characterized. It ought not be decent nor ought it be gentle or soft or humble; it ought to lead to success." Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that to achieve its purpose, propaganda must "be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away."

Some Nazi propaganda used positive images to glorify the government’s leaders and its various activities, projecting a glowing vision of the “national community.” Nazi propaganda could also be ugly and negative, creating fear and loathing by portraying those the regime considered to be enemies as dangerous and even sub-human. The Nazis’ distribution of antisemitic films, newspaper cartoons, and even children’s books aroused centuries-old prejudices against Jews (see Lesson 6) and also presented new ideas about the racial impurity of Jews. The newspaper Der Stürmer (The Attacker), published by Nazi Party member Julius Streicher, was a key outlet for antisemitic propaganda.

This lesson includes a selection of Nazi propaganda images, both “positive” and “negative.” It focuses on posters that Germans would have seen in newspapers like Der Stürmer and passed in the streets, in workplaces, and in schools. Some of these posters were advertisements for traveling exhibits—on topics like “The Eternal Jew” or the evils of communism—that were themselves examples of propaganda.

Related Materials

• Video Propaganda during World War I: An Appeal to You!

Preparing to Teach

A note to teachers.

Before teaching this text set, please review the following information to help guide your preparation process.

Propaganda and Stereotypes

• The poster  The Eternal Jew and other images in this lesson portray inaccurate, offensive stereotypes of Jews. Teachers have the responsibility to acknowledge that these images contain stereotypes and to prepare their students to discuss the material in a thoughtful and respectful manner.
• Devoting time on the first day of the lesson to a whole-group analysis of The Eternal Jew provides the opportunity to set an appropriate tone for students throughout the lesson and the unit. You might set this tone by asking students to refer back to the concept maps they created for stereotype in  Lesson 3: Stereotypes and "Single Stories," as well as their journal responses to Chimamanda Adichie’s  The Danger of a Single Story , before working with the images in this lesson.
• Image The Eternal Jew
• Lesson Stereotypes and "Single Stories"
• Reading The Danger of a Single Story

The Pervasiveness of Nazi Propaganda: An Important Reminder

Even with two days devoted to this lesson, it is not possible to provide students with examples of every form of Nazi propaganda. They need to understand that it pervaded every aspect of society—radio, the press, feature films and newsreels, theater, music, art exhibits, books, the school curriculum, sports, and more. Propaganda was not a separate stream of information; it was embedded in all of the existing information streams in German society.

While not explicitly addressed in this lesson, it is also important to note that the Nazis created propaganda for a variety of other purposes as well, most notably to encourage adulation of Hitler and, eventually, to encourage support for war.

Crop It: A Teaching Strategy for Analyzing Images

Students will use the Crop It teaching strategy to analyze several propaganda images in this lesson. Before beginning, make sure that you have prepared cropping tools for students to use. (You might also have students create them if you think that you will have time during class.) Each tool consists of two L -shaped strips of paper (cut from the border of a blank sheet of 8 ½ x 11-inch paper), and each student will need two L -shaped cropping tools to work with.

• Teaching Strategy Crop It

Previewing Vocabulary

The following are key vocabulary terms used in this lesson:

• Media literacy

Add these words to your  Word Wall , if you are using one for this unit, and provide necessary support to help students learn these words as you teach the lesson.

• Teaching Strategy Word Wall

Save this resource for easy access later.

Lesson plans.

Introduce the Concept of Propaganda

• Explain to students that in this lesson, they will continue to examine the Nazis’ efforts to shape the German “national community” according to their racial ideals. This meant privileging “Aryans” and discriminating against those of so-called inferior races, such as Jews. In the last lesson, students looked at how the Nazis used laws to accomplish this goal. In this lesson, they will look at the way the Nazis used propaganda—through radio, the press, feature films and newsreels, theater, music, art exhibits, books, the school curriculum, sports, and more—to influence the beliefs, feelings, and actions of individuals to help further this goal.  
• Begin by having students reflect on the power of media to persuade. Ask them to respond to the following question in their journals: Do you think people are generally skeptical? Or are they too willing to believe what they learn on the internet, see on television, or hear from politicians or celebrities? How do you decide whether or not to believe what you see and hear? You might have students discuss their responses using the  Think, Pair, Share strategy, or briefly hear a few students’ thoughts as a whole group.  
• Then tell students that when governments or politicians use media to persuade people, we often call that propaganda . In the Lesson 11 reading  Shaping Public Opinion , students learned about how Hitler established the Bureau of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment in 1933 and appointed Joseph Goebbels as its leader. It is worth reviewing or reminding students of that reading and then establishing a definition for propaganda . Provide students with the following definition:  Propaganda: Information that is intended to persuade an audience to accept a particular idea or cause, often by using biased material or by stirring up emotions.
• Teaching Strategy Think-Pair-Share
• Reading Shaping Public Opinion

Analyze “The Eternal Jew” Poster

• Tell students that in the activities that follow today and in the next class, they will analyze specific propaganda images used by the Nazis. If you haven’t already, take a moment to pause and set the tone for viewing the images by asking students to revisit the stereotype concept maps they created (or the one the class created together) as part of  Lesson 3: Stereotypes and “Single Stories” (see Notes to Teacher).
• Then guide students through the  Crop It strategy to analyze a propaganda image together as a whole class. Post or project the image  The Eternal Jew and tell students that this is a poster representing a museum exhibit in Germany in 1937 and 1938 that was titled “The Eternal Jew.”
• Identify a part of the image that first caught your eye
• Identify a part of the image that raises a question for you.
• Identify a part of the image that is designed to make you feel rather than think.
• Identify a part of the image that is designed to make certain individuals feel included in or excluded from the German "national community."

“The Eternal Jew” Class Discussion

Remind students that propagandists meticulously pervaded all aspects of German society and used a wide range of forms of propaganda to serve particular purposes and convey specific messages. Students should assume that every detail has a purpose. Finish this activity by discussing the following questions with the class:

• What is the message the creator of this image is sending?
• What does the maker of this image want the viewer to feel?  
• What does the creator of this image want the viewer to do? 

Propaganda Warm-Up

• Before introducing new examples of Nazi propaganda, spend a few minutes reviewing with students the key ideas from the previous day. Ask students to look back at their journal responses about the influence of media to see how their thinking might have changed as a result of analyzing the poster  The Eternal Jew .
• Alternatively, you might project the poster again and ask students to work with a partner to make a short list of strategies that the creator(s) of the image used to convey an intended message. You could solicit ideas from each pair and record a list on the board to reference later in the lesson.

Analyze Additional Nazi Propaganda Images

• There are three additional examples of Nazi propaganda images for students to examine in this activity using the  Crop It teaching strategy that you modeled the previous day. By analyzing a collection of such images, students can see that the Nazis created some propaganda that denigrated Jews and other so-called inferior races, while they created other propaganda that glorified “Aryans.” The goal of both approaches was to influence the beliefs, feelings, and actions of individuals in Germany about who should be included and excluded from the “national community.”
• Divide students into groups of three or four to work together at analyzing the three images in the  Propaganda Posters gallery.
• Lead students through the same series of instructions for the  Crop It strategy listed in Day 1. You might project the list of prompts on the board for each group to reference as students work, or copy and paste them onto a handout for each table.
• Depending on the amount of time you have available, have each member of each group analyze a separate image, taking notes in response to each prompt and then sharing their observations with the other members of their group. Alternatively, if you have more time to devote to this activity, you might have every student work with the same image simultaneously, discussing their thinking in their groups along the way. If you choose the second strategy, consider passing out the images one at a time so that the groups don’t rush through the process.
• Do you notice any themes or patterns in this group of propaganda images?
• Based on the images you have analyzed in this lesson, how do you think the Nazis used propaganda to define the identities of individuals and groups?
• Based on the images you have analyzed and what you have learned thus far in this unit about the rise of the Nazi Party and the Nazi Party’s platform, what can you conclude about the ideal “national community” the Nazis strove to foster? How did they use propaganda to further their goal of creating this ideal “national community”?
• Gallery Propaganda Posters

Consider the Impact of Propaganda

• Now that students have seen and analyzed several examples of Nazi propaganda, ask them to think about the impact these forms of media might have had on the beliefs, feelings, and actions of the people who were exposed to them. It is common for students to conclude after studying propaganda that the Nazis succeeded at brainwashing the German population, but it is important to help them think carefully about this idea. The quotations in the handout  The Impact of Propaganda —one from a woman who lived in the Netherlands during this period and another from a contemporary scholar—can help to complicate the idea of a brainwashed populace.  
• Give students the handout  The Impact of Propaganda .  Read aloud Marion Pritchard’s reflection on viewing a film at the museum exhibit “The Eternal Jew” and ask students to respond to the questions in a class discussion or with a partner. Then read aloud scholar Daniel Goldhagen’s ideas about the limits of the power of propaganda and ask students to respond to the questions in a class discussion.
• Handout The Impact of Propaganda
• Teaching Strategy Read Aloud

3-2-1 Exit Ticket

On an index card or half-sheet of paper, ask students to complete an exit ticket using the  3-2-1 strategy format before leaving the classroom. They should address the following prompts, which you can project on the board or distribute on the tickets:

• Write down 3 things you learned about how the Nazis used propaganda to influence the way Germans defined their universe of obligation.
• Write down 2 questions you have about Nazi propaganda or propaganda and brainwashing.
• Write down 1 thing you learned that supported or challenged your thinking in your journal response at the beginning of the lesson about the way media can influence our beliefs and actions.
• Teaching Strategy 3-2-1
• Teaching Strategy Exit Tickets

Check for Understanding

• Assign students to independently complete the  Crop It viewing protocol that they used in this lesson with a new image. Assign students a piece of propaganda, or allow them to choose their own, and have them record their answers to the prompts outside of class. Review their work to check for the quality of their observations and the depth of their analysis of the propaganda’s purpose. There are additional examples of Nazi propaganda in the Holocaust and Human Behavior online image gallery  The Impact of Propaganda .
• Evaluate students’ responses on their exit cards to find evidence of their thinking about how propaganda influences people’s beliefs, attitudes, and actions. Look for nuance in students’ thinking that resists the notion that propaganda succeeds simply by brainwashing its audience. 

Extension Activities

Watch and Analyze the Video Art as Propaganda: The Nazi Degenerate Art Exhibit

• To expose students to another form of Nazi propaganda, consider showing the short video  Art as Propaganda: The Nazi Degenerate Art Exhibit (08:18). In addition to explaining the importance of this traveling 1937 exhibit, Dr. Jonathan Petropoulos also discusses the role of propaganda in the 1930s as a means of spreading the Nazis’ message and how it contributed to their rise to power.
• Because it is important for students to view the images as they watch the short film, ask them to complete an activity based on the  Connect, Extend, Challenge strategy after they have finished watching. Be sure that students are making connections with what they have learned in the prior activities in this lesson.
• Video Art as Propaganda: The Nazi Degenerate Art Exhibit
• Teaching Strategy Connect, Extend, Challenge

Watch and Analyze Triumph of the Will

The film  Triumph of the Will (01:44:27), directed by Leni Riefenstahl, is both a powerful work of Nazi propaganda and a landmark in the art of filmmaking. It portrays the massive 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, and it includes scenes that strongly suggest the Nazi vision for “national community.” Consider showing students a clip from the film, such as the opening scene of Hitler’s arrival at and parade through Nuremberg (00:00–09:15) or the Nazi Youth Encampment (13:40–18:05). You can use the  Close Viewing Protocol to guide your students through a more thorough examination of the film and how it attempts to communicate its messages.

• Video Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens)
• Teaching Strategy Close Viewing Protocol

Discuss the Use of Propaganda Today

It is worth engaging students in a reflection on and analysis of propaganda in our society today. The following questions can help start the discussion:

• Can you think of examples of propaganda in society today?
• How is propaganda similar to advertising? How is it different?
• How do you think such propaganda influences the attitudes and actions of people today?
• Is there a difference between the impact of propaganda in a democracy that has a free press and an open marketplace of ideas and the impact of propaganda in a dictatorship with fewer non-governmental sources of information?

Materials and Downloads

Explore the materials, the eternal jew, the impact of propaganda, adding to evidence logs, 1 of 3.

Youth and the National Community

You might also be interested in…

Analyzing nazi propaganda, antisemitic conflation: what is the impact of conflating all jews with the actions and policies of the israeli government, discussing contemporary islamophobia in the classroom, confronting islamophobia, exploring islamophobic tropes, addressing islamophobia in the media, understanding gendered islamophobia, standing up against contemporary islamophobia, influence, celebrity, and the dangers of online hate, where do we get our news and why does it matter, learning to navigate generative ai content: media literacy strategies, creating healthy news habits, unlimited access to learning. more added every month..

Facing History & Ourselves is designed for educators who want to help students explore identity, think critically, grow emotionally, act ethically, and participate in civic life. It’s hard work, so we’ve developed some go-to professional learning opportunities to help you along the way.

Exploring ELA Text Selection with Julia Torres

Working for justice, equity and civic agency in our schools: a conversation with clint smith, centering student voices to build community and agency, inspiration, insights, & ways to get involved.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

Guest Essay

Democrats: Stop Panicking

By Stuart Stevens

Mr. Stevens is a former Republican political consultant who is an adviser to the Lincoln Project.

As a former Republican who spent decades pointing out flaws in the Democratic Party, I watch the current Democratic panic over President Biden’s debate performance with a mix of bafflement and nostalgia.

It’s baffling that so many Democrats are failing to rally around a wildly successful president after one bad night. But it does remind me of why Republicans defeated Democrats in so many races Republicans should have lost.

Donald Trump has won one presidential election. He did so with about 46 percent of the popular vote. (Mitt Romney lost with about 47 percent.) The Republican Party lost its mind and decided that this one victory negated everything we know about politics. But it didn’t.

One debate does not change the structure of this presidential campaign. For all the talk of Mr. Biden’s off night, what is lost is that Mr. Trump missed a great opportunity to reset his candidacy and greatly strengthen his position.

Mr. Trump lost the popular vote by a margin of seven million and needs new customers. He could have laid out a positive economic plan to appeal to middle-class voters feeling economic pressure. Instead, he celebrated his tax cuts for billionaires.

He could have reassured voters who are horrified, in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise, by the stories of young girls who become pregnant by rape and then must endure extremist politicians eager to criminalize what was a constitutional right for two generations. But Mr. Trump bizarrely asserted that a majority pro-abortion-rights country hated Roe v. Wade and celebrated his role in replacing individual choice with the heavy hand of government.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .