Propaganda through media

Public reading of the anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, Worms, Nazi Germany, 1935

The definition of propaganda is most commonly defined as "information", especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. It includes the deliberate sharing of realities, views, and philosophies intended to alter behavior and stimulate people to act.

To explain the close associations between media and propaganda, Richard Alan Nelson observed propaganda as a form of persuasion with intention with the aid of controlled transmission of single-sided information through mass media. Mass media and propaganda are inseparable.

Mass media as a system for spreading and disseminating information and messages to public plays a role in amusing, entertaining and informing individuals with rules and values that situate them in social structure. Thus, propaganda is a necessity for creating conflicts between different classes in society. In a media-saturated modern society, mass media is the main channel for the carrying out the propaganda action and fulfill the propaganda practices.

Modern propaganda includes using a variety of media in order to spread messages. This could include using press, radio, television, film, computers, fax machines, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing, handbills, buttons, billboards, speeches, flags, street names, monuments, coins, stamps, books, plays, comic strips, poetry, music, sporting events, cultural events, company reports, libraries, and awards and prizes.

Origins

Military recruiting poster of US during wartimes.

"Propaganda" was a term that was commonly used in 1914, the beginning of the World War, though its origin can be traced back to the ancient Greece. In Athens, the original place of civilization as well as the centre of humankind culture, the citizen class was conscious and well informed of their interests and public affairs. Thus, conflicts and divergence on individual interests and other religious matters demands propaganda. Without the modern mass media such as newspaper, radio and televisions functioning as a medium for information spreading, a series of alternatives can play a role for propagandizing values and beliefs to shape and mould the opinions of men. These can include dramas, games and religious festivals. Additionally, another tool for propaganda in an oral-biased society is articulation.

Propaganda today is endowed with negative connotative meanings in a political context, despite that the word entered language with religious origins. Pope Gregory XV established an institution for spreading the faith and addressing a series of church affairs, which is namely the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Further, a College of Propaganda was set up under Pope Urban VIII to train priests for missions.

America's Best Comics #7 July 1944. With the war in full swing, patriotically-themed comic books were an important source of propaganda.

Throughout the historical stages, propaganda has always been evident in momentum social movements such as American independence, the French Revolution, and especially during wartimes. Wartime propaganda is often demanded for shaping public opinions to gain more allies on an international level, as well as calling for citizens to make a contribution and sacrifice to the war on a domestic level. Governments during the First World War devoted massive resources and huge amounts of effort to producing material designed to shape opinion and action internationally. As Clark claimed, posters in wartime with some visual codes are powerful tools to make people adapt to the new conditions and norms arising from the wars and to accommodate the needs of the war. During the Second World War, the power of propaganda came to the extreme, under the horrors of Nazi Germany. And since then, the word carries more negative connotations than neutral.

Nowadays, the term is used in journalism, advertising, and education mostly in a political context. In non-democratic countries, propaganda continues to flourish as a means for indoctrinating citizens, and this practice is unlikely to cease in the future.

In its origins, "propaganda" is an ancient and honorable word.

Propaganda on social media

Social media has become a powerful tool for propaganda as the Internet is unprecedentedly accessible for each individual, and interactive social networking sites provide a strong platform for debate and sharing opinions. Propaganda, in forms of a video uploaded to YouTube, a post on Facebook or Twitter, or even a piece of comment, has far-reaching effectiveness to disseminate certain values and beliefs.

Another element that makes social media effective for sharing propaganda is that it can reach many people with little effort and users can filter the content to remove content they do not want while retaining what they would like to see. This ease of use can be used by ordinary people as well as government agencies and politicians, who can take advantage of the platforms to spread "junk" news in favor of their cause.

Youtube Propaganda

YouTube has over 1 billion users each month. This means that many people will likely have a chance to see videos posted by others. With this being such a huge place for propaganda to thrive, terrorist groups like ISIS will try and get their videos on YouTube for millions to see. Terrorist’s use of social media and the Internet to share their ideals and goals is well known and documented. Groups like Isis use the Internet and social media sites as a tool for propaganda, sharing information, data mining, fundraising, communication, and recruitment.

The Isis social media nerve center is its Al Hayat Media Centre which is sending many of these messages which reveal the propaganda tools it is using. They often post videos of them helping out civilians or kids. They try and manipulate their videos to show them being "nice" to try and change people's opinion about them. However, they also post videos to strike fear into others and to persuade them to join their cause. This form of cyber-terrorism is a very big deal to governments around the world. Fearing their own people will be swayed to join groups like ISIS. ISIS post videos to appeal to extremists, "they make these videos in a way to entice people who are vulnerable to extremist ways."

As it is reported in New York Times, "A propaganda video is released by North Korea on YouTube mainly depicting a United States aircraft carrier and a warplane being destroyed in computer-generated balls of fire, the latest salvo in an escalating war of words between the two. The video released by a state media outlet is narrated by a woman and including images of North Korea’s military. According to the video, North Korea’s missiles will be "stabbed into the throat of the carrier," and the jet will "fall from the sky," it warns."

In regards of the event of Westminster terrorism attacking, YouTube is also an important tool for ISIS terrorism propaganda. ISIS flooded YouTube with hundreds of violent recruitment videos with terrifying visual or audio effects to promote and awake Westminster terror attack to capitalise on the atrocity. As The Sun reported, "many of the videos glorify terrorist Khalid Masood while others feature beheadings and extreme violence carried out by children."

Twitter propaganda

The Computational Propaganda Research Project

In 2017 the University of Oxford announced the launch of a series of studies researching how social media is globally used to manipulate public opinion. The study, which used interviews and "tens of millions posts on seven different social media platforms during scores of elections, political crises, and national security incidents", found that in Russia, approximately 45% of Twitter accounts are bots and in Taiwan, a campaign against President Tsai Ing-wen involved thousands of accounts being heavily coordinated and sharing Chinese propaganda.

Techniques to like, share, and post on social networks were used. The bot accounts were used to "game algorithms" to push different content on the platforms. Real content put out by real people can be covered up and bots can make online measures of support, such as the number of likes or retweets something has received, look larger than it should, thus tricking users into thinking that specific piece of content is popular, a process identified as manufacturing consensus.

Russian Propaganda on Twitter

During the 2016 presidential election, 200,000 tweets deemed as "malicious activity" from Russia-linked accounts were outed on Twitter. The accounts pushed hundreds of thousands of these tweets claiming that Democrats were practicing witchcraft and posed as Black Lives Matter activists. Investigators were able to trace the account to a Kremlin-linked propaganda outfit. It was founded in 2013 and known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA).

Saudi Arabian Propaganda on Twitter

The New York Times reported in late October 2018 that Saudi Arabia used an online army of Twitter trolls.

Terrorism propaganda on Twitter

"Using little-known content uploading services, anonymous text-pasting sites and multiple backup Twitter accounts, a select group of ISIS operatives managed to evade administrators’ controls to spread the Cantlie video, titled Lend Me Your Ears, around the web within a few hours."

In another example of propaganda, Abdulrahman, the operator al-Hamid used the techniques of hashtagging in a Twitter post to gain the heat of the topics to disseminate the information. A great deal of followers of Hamid on Twitter were demanded to find the highest trending topics in the UK and popular account names they could jump on to get the largest possible reach. As @Abu_Laila wrote: "We need those who can supply us with the most active hashtags in the UK. And also the accounts of the most famous celebrities. I believe that the hashtag of Scotland's separation from Britain should be the first."

Propaganda on Facebook

Facebook has made huge impact on society by allowing thousands of people to communicate with their family and friends, and be able to keep up-to-date with the rest of the world. But the usage of Facebook leads to the activity of propaganda online. For example, the Facebook pages of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces in 2013 and 2014, uses images to promote their agendas relating to politics during the conflicts following 2011 uprisings in Syria. Their government uses visual frames to help support the image that President Assad is a "fearless leader protecting its people and that life has continued normally through Syria," and to help strengthen the images of the violence and sufferings of the civilians caused by the Assad regime.

There is also research that "cloaked" Facebook accounts are behind the creation of spreading political propaganda online to "imitate the identity of an opponent so they can spark hateful and aggressive reactions" from the media and the opponent. The process goes after a case study on a Danish Facebook pages that are cloaking their pages to resemble radical Islamist pages to help "[provoke} racist and anti-Muslim reactions as well as negative sentiments towards refugees and immigrants in Denmark." The research founded on the pages analyzes the challenges of propaganda online, such as epistemological, methodological and conceptual challenges. The information also adds to the reader's "understanding of disinformation and propaganda in an increasingly interactive social media environment and contributes to a critical inquiry into social media and subversive politics."

American Propaganda on Facebook

In October 2018, The Daily Telegraph reported that Facebook "banned hundreds of pages and accounts which it says were fraudulently flooding its site with partisan political content – although they came from the US instead of being associated with Russia."

Propaganda in Music

Music has always played a major role in popular culture.  Political ideology is often spread through media; however, the use of music reaches an extremely wide and varying audience.  The point of propaganda, according to Manzaria and Bruck, is to “Persuade people’s attitude, beliefs, and behaviors”. Music of all genres is constantly being used to portray a political view, shed light, or bring validity to a subject the author, or artist, feels is worth venturing.  Propaganda through modes like advertisement and campaign, while effective, will only reach a small group of the desired recipients.

According to Putman, musical propaganda has a great deal to do with the audience. Each musical genre can reach a specific demographic within a few minutes, along with the propaganda intertwined. Purfleau brings a more social view to the concept of politically motivated music, stating that musical propaganda is "the basis for a certain kind of political art that aspires to contest the contemporary economic and social order". Purfleau's approach to understanding musical propaganda explains the timeless manor by which music has been used to portray viewpoints. Though music is not always the first media thought of when contemplating propaganda, it is an extremely effective mode and has proved to influence popular culture throughout human history.

See also

• Media manipulation
• Propaganda
• Propaganda techniques
• History of propaganda
• Political music
• Media bias
• Media bias in the United States

Further reading

• Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. Trans. Konrad Kellen & Jean Lerner. New York: Knopf, 1965. New York: Random House/ Vintage 1973
• The Techniques of Propaganda
• Defining Propaganda II
• Media's Use of Propaganda to Persuade People's Attitude, Beliefs and Behaviors