Propaganda as a means of affecting people has been in societies for a while and is still pretty much alive. In fact right now it is so much easier to reach the hearts of the masses (mainly due to the progress in technology and science). Also there are numerous social and political groups which want to increase the number of their followers and convince more people to support their cause. Some of them may be harmful thus one should be able to protect themselves from propaganda and respond rationally. Possibilities to do both have been significantly amplified recently by the technologies, which is the main topic of this post.

Defining propaganda

Before diving into the depths of modern propaganda and how the latest achievements in technology drastically changed its paradigm let’s start from what propaganda is at its core.

There are many different definitions which vary in their formality, but all of them one way or another have two things in common: propaganda is aimed at groups’ (most of the time) and the aim is to change the perception of a specific matter. Thus let me give the definition borrowed from here:

Propaganda is a strategy of mass communication aiming at controlling people’s beliefs.
(some other can be check out here and of course, Wiki)

Basically this means that someone or some group needs a target group to change their perception and understanding of the reality surrounding them and react in the way the propagandists are expecting from the target. Much more often the reaction is intended to be emotional, not rational. In this case it is more difficult to analyze the given arguments whether they are true, complete and fully describe the matter. But not always.

Such a broad definition was selected not only because it is very short, but also because it does not put any borders between the different kinds of influencing people’s minds and hearts in order to get a necessary response. Some actually do perform such a split (separating in the process public relations, persuasion, education etc.), leaving propaganda with only negative connotations, which got only worse in the 20th and 21st centuries.

(because of this I suspect that this is the reason why people often tend to associate propaganda only with emotional reactions)

 

Instead, I prefer to consider all such kinds of mass communication together and view them all as propaganda because of their common characteristics:

• the communication is addressed to masses;
• “propagandists” have one specific goal in mind;
• the means of delivering the messages to the subjects.

In this post I am not going to focus on psychological aspects and techniques much, but mostly on the last point and how technological development has changed the rules and the nature of propaganda itself. Also despite that currently basically any social group can promote its own narratives, the further text first of all will be related to politics and governments, as it can be seen throughout history the most, therefore it will be easier to compare with what happens now.

And the ways of how people were trying to persuade each other in the past is exactly what I’m going to describe next.

 

History

Before the 20th century

One of the earliest examples is the time of the Roman Civil Wars (44-30 BCE) during which Octavian and Mark Antony (and their supporters) blamed each other for every possible and impossible sins just in order to gain favor of people. The speeches were in the form of invective and usually at that time it was a decisive tool to shape the public opinion.

In the Middle Ages the church was in a unique position of being a political power and at the same time holding complete monopoly upon the medium (masses, preaches) of spreading their narratives. That included basically everything: “encouraging” to pay for the release of sins, getting rid of unwanted people, sending entire countries to crusades.

Reformation was a period when propaganda gained a significant boost, when the printing press was used by rulers for the first time. Around 70 years after inventing printing the biggest European cities had their own press, which actively was used to promote works written by the Protestants. There, they declared that the corrupted Pope should not be the main authority in the religious world, indulgences must not be sold and bought and that every person should be granted access to the Bible and to interpret it for themselves. Invention of the printing press was crucial and allowed Martin Luther to spread his (and other reformists) ideas to people.

“95 theses” by Martin Luther

Of course “the official” catholic church needed to join the race and they too were trying to utilize the latest achievements in technology and by spreading their narratives they were trying to regain their “lost” believers. That is, in 1622 counter-reformists founded the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, or simply Propaganda Fide (lat.). That is believed to be the time when the term propaganda started to be used in the modern meaning.

Printed press and books continued to increase their importance in social and political life throughout the 17th-19th centuries. That is, during the first French Revolution the revolutionary governments and parties promoted their ideas and calls through numerous newspapers, brochures, pamphlets etc., which led to real actions, sometimes tragic. Some Jean-Paul Marat for a long time promoted a violent approach towards the “internal enemies” in his own newspaper, which along with many other factors led to the infamous September massacres.

a cover of the original “Le Père Duchesne”, another very popular (in Paris at least) newspaper during the first period of the Revolution until its author was executed

Also in that time, especially in 1793-1794, very strict censorship was applied.

The 20th century

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries more new media emerged – radio and silent motion pictures (which later evolved into films), which only extended the range of ways and techniques of affecting the human mind and heart, making propaganda even more effective. The most notable thing though, is the adoption of propaganda as a part of the state policy and the scale on which it was conducted. During WW1 literally everything was used to mobilize people, to motivate them to work longer, enlist in the army, to demoralize soldiers on the battlefield.

“How Britain prepared”, a WW1 british film

A german poster, encouraging women to work in the Home Army. The source

Beside that it became possible to produce and more important, to deliver visual evidence of atrocities and destruction caused by the enemy, which surely was used to mobilize people even more and trigger necessary emotions.

a photo of the destroyed French city of Reims, 1918. The source

Then propaganda was turned into one more type of weapon.

The two infamous regimes – nazi and bolsheviks, used literally everything (including art as a part of official politics) they could and what was available at that time and utilized it at maximum, just to make sure that everyone follows them. The main “achievements” though, were mostly in the psychological aspect and the scale – the main principles of delivery and interaction were rather amplified, but not transformed.

 

Paradigm shift in the “digital age”

Having TV more and more available to an average person, which gradually evolved into personal PCs and smartphones, people got a possibility to organize their personal informational space. That surely lets propaganda get into human’s most intimate spaces like rest and entertainment. In this case if an average person spends most of their time on the internet using a phone, then it basically means that propaganda will follow such a person everywhere. In this case it’s much more difficult to separate the consumption of propaganda from the personal communication (and probably professional too). That can make propaganda even more undetectable, implicit and pretending to be natural, which is actually one of its main features.

“Echo chambers”

Over the last ten years amounts of data people upload onto the internet have grown enormously and different applications may know their users even better than the users themselves. Some of those apps which gather and store content produced by regular people (like youtube) or social networks make recommendations based on user data. By liking a specific kind of content the application is encouraged to propose even more such videos, to suggest even more groups/communities with similar interests. This may trap users in so-called “echo chambers”, where only a specific narrative is translated without (or with very little and weak) any other opinions.

People can be pushed into such environments in a couple of other ways. Some companies may want to make even bigger profits from user data, so sometimes they sell it to third parties. This data allows them to send aggressive advertisements of various nature (political too, of course). Apart from selling, the information about users can be just leaked or stolen.

Furthermore, currently it’s not even required for the participants of such “specialized communities” to exist. Numerous groups can have much more bots than actual users, but that definitely would help to prepare a necessary image and convince more people. And this has proven to be quite effective, so even presidential elections can be affected.

Participatory propaganda

Previously I merely scratched the surface of the main difference between how it was earlier and how it is now. The thing is that the nature of the digitalization assumes that every participant produces data. Information (thus, propaganda too) is consumed not in a passive way, but actively participating in this consumption.

Likes, comments, shares etc. Source

In this model of interaction, people are actively participating in propaganda spreading and this way they remember it even better, like in learning by doing.

Participation is a type of cognitive investment. People engage differently when they are themselves participants in the narrative. They experience the narrative as it’s developing – it becomes part of their lived experience. Posting, commenting, tagging and sharing – they are no longer at arm’s length from the subject matter. The Interpreter

In a virtual environment it’s also much easier and quicker to act, which can be in the form of passing the news, persuading others etc.

State monopoly over propaganda

It might seem that digital environments are too “wild” and spontaneous that everyone is in more or less the same conditions to share news and fight for the truth. However, authoritarian and totalitarian countries would argue that. The most (in)famous example is China with its Great Firewall. The government blocks everything which may harm the party line. This allows the rulers to use all possible media to translate their narratives repetitively.

North Korea goes even further in this matter, shutting its population down from the world completely.

 

Conclusion

To sum things up I would like to say that nowadays propaganda has gained an almost ultimate toolset to be effective (maybe only missing chips in our heads to directly control people). But brilliant propagandists still should be not only skilled in the technical tools, but they must know, understand and be able to exploit human nature. Or end up like these guys otherwise.

References

1. Universiteit van Nederland. “How does propaganda change our beliefs?” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2ncGTvkxDQ
2. Gregory Asmolov. The effects of participatory propaganda: from socialization to internalization of conflicts – https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/jyzg7j6x/release/2
3. Propaganda on Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
4. L’Ami du Peuple on Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Ami_du_peuple
5. Le Père Duchesne on Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_P%C3%A8re_Duchesne
6. Zac Rogers, Emily Bienvenue, Maryanne Kelton. Paradigm shift: Understanding propaganda in the digital age – https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/paradigm-shift-understanding-propaganda-digital-age
7. Haifeng Huang, Nicholas Cruz. Propaganda, Presumed Influence, and Collective Protest – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-021-09683-0