Today in class during the awareness presentation, I learned more about propaganda. I learned that propaganda is information that is biased and intentionally misleading information shared to promote political stances or agendas with the goal to influence public opinion. Propaganda often shares the half-truth which is what makes it misleading.
Every time I hear about propaganda, there is always mention of its use during wartime. Propaganda was very popular during World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. The posters often shared messages trying to persuade the audience to join the army, or influence their stance on the current controversy.
The presentation on propaganda led me to do a little more digging. I found in this article that there are four common techniques used in propaganda including emotional persuasion, disinformation, denial of truth, and fight against propaganda.
Emotional persuasion uses messages to pull at people’s heartstrings because many human opinions are based on feelings and emotions rather than facts or reasons. These messages rely on logical fallacies and cognitive biases. Logical fallacies are sneaky errors in reasoning while cognitive biases are errors in the interpretation of information from our brains.
Disinformation is basically fake news, it may look real and truthful, but the information is false or not the entire truth. In order to use disinformation, propaganda would exploit some crack in the story then find a way to mix the truth and lies. Sometimes conspiracy theories or rumors are presented as news and create disinformation.
Denial of truth is when someone denies that a fact is truthful or that something doesn't exist. People using this method try to persuade people to be on their side of denial. Denying that climate change exists is an example of this method.
Propaganda can be effective, but it can also be dangerous due to its persuasive effect. The internet and social media have impacted the way propaganda is spread and has changed the form. Instead of existing in the form of printed posters, propaganda can be rapidly and widely spread on social media and websites. This encourages me to do true and factual research before basing my opinions on a single Instagram post.
Additionally, this article shares many examples of how past propaganda has been transformed and used in other ways like memes or the same images but different messages.
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