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
You mean to want to know how something can be consider propaganda?
Many things that are spread around an idea, a religion, a political party are indeed propaganda, causes like Greenpeace and Peta are propaganda too. People think of propaganda like a bad thing because some of their ideas have a bad reputation and many others are made to spread misinformation around someone or something, thats where things get complicated and why “making propaganda” is bad, because you’re confusing or creating debate over something that people would not agree.
Responsible informative media helps you to think, propaganda makes you feel. Not all information is necessarily useful to everyone and conveying an idea through story and emotion can help the uninterested or even dimwitted take an important idea to heart.
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.
Propaganda is a word that comes from a latin verb meaning “to propagate” (aka spread), so propaganda has the purpose of spreading a way of thinking. The word “propaganda” has become synonymous with the expression “political propaganda”, so that’s what you think when you hear of propaganda , but there are other types, with the most noteworthy being “commercial propaganda” aka advertisements.
Advertisements want to spread one way of thinking (basically “buy our product”), so that’s why having things like a catchy jingle, slogan or a charismatic spokesperson for the product.
Political propaganda can also have those things, but they’re more common when they wanna sell you a candidate or convince you that one candidate is bad (the “Yes, We Can” slogan selling Obama, Joe The Plumber being an anti-Obama spokesman are both examples of this). The most powerful propaganda is not aimed at a particular candidate as that is kind of on the nose and people catch that and resist it more easily, but it’s aimed at groups of people, countries, situations and so on.
For instance, talking about how Marjorie Taylor Greene believed there was a Jewish space laser when it happened was just reporting on the news, but talking about repeatedly as a joke and showing contempt is negative propaganda (as deserved as it may be). Talking repeatedly about how Liz Truss wouldn’t last as UK prime minister and comparing her to a slowly rotting cabbage is negative propaganda. Talking about how solar energy will save the world from global warming is positive propaganda for solar. Immigrants will steal our jobs? Negative propaganda on immigrats. Save the world, go vegan? Positive propaganda on veganism. And so on
If the target of the message, be it a foreign adversary or an ethic group or a political party, is BOTH an existential threat to the body politic (such as “the American way of life”) AND incredibly weak, stupid, and feeble, it’s propaganda.
Examples include: how transgender people are both going to “trap” the unsuspecting heterosexual AND “so stupid, they aren’t fooling anyone”; Fox News saying that Harris going to destroy American values AND is totally reliant upon DEI to get anywhere; MSNBC saying that the GOP is a threat to American democracy AND Trump is a buffoon. Once you start looking for it you can’t help but see it everywhere.
If you want more, see Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky.
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