I hear it used all the time, but noticed I don’t know exactly what it means. The actual definition of it is very broad.
“The spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.”
However, this doesn’t quite feel like how the word is often used. I’ve only ever seen it used with a negative connotation. If I were to spread information about climate change for the planet, am I spreading propaganda?
In: Other
Here’s the critical piece to propaganda that is often missed. It’s not simply that some central authority for messaging puts out a statement and followers disseminate. That’s just in-group communication.
Propaganda has core objective of working autonomously, meaning the organizations who put it out want the population to internalize it and be able to come up with and disseminate new propaganda *without any central messaging at all*. They do this on two fronts.
1) It makes you *feel* a specific way about certain kinds of information. Sometimes the propaganda tells you how to feel, sometimes it just implies or makes secondary connections (a pundit crying while describing something that you wouldn’t normally care about). Either way, you can read news from any source and feel the feelings your propagandists command for that information.
2) It makes you *internalize the logic and style* of the propaganda. Just like with feeling emotions, it is meant to circumvent your normal thought processes. Again, this is so that you can encounter a situation in the wild, and with no other person telling you what to do, your brain will chose a response perfectly congruent with how your propagandists would command you to act if they were there.
The above two are why you can see something happen in the news, and within 30 seconds of a headline there will be thousands of statements that are nearly verbatim with each other. Yes, this happened before bots. Bots now do a great job of amplifying propaganda effects, especially when they are commanded to comment the moment a headline is released.
You wanting to spread information about climate change isn’t necessarily propaganda. It can be teaching, it can be scientific, it can be personal interest. But a compulsion to spread that information and your choice of sources and style of document and key phrases are definitely going to be influenced by propaganda (and thus… propaganda) whether you are conscious to it or not.
Latest Answers