Propaganda through media
Today, various amounts of modern media can be used to supply propaganda to its intended audience such as, radio, television, films posters handouts music smartphones, just to name a few.
[7] Governments during the First World War devoted massive resources and huge amounts of effort to producing material designed to shape opinion and action internationally.
[13] 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.
[15] The Economist reported that, shortly before the 2021 Ugandan general election, Facebook removed a network of government-linked accounts engaged in "coordinated inauthentic behavior" to boost support for Yoweri Museveni, the incumbent president.
[12] In 2011, The Guardian reported that the United States Central Command (Centcom) was working with HBGary to develop software that would allow the US government to "secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda."
"[21] 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.
"[22] In 2022, the Stanford Internet Observatory and Graphika studied datasets of banned accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms that used deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives.
The accounts pushed hundreds of thousands of these tweets claiming that Democrats were practicing witchcraft and posed as Black Lives Matter activists.
[34] In 2011, The Guardian reported that the United States Central Command (Centcom) was working with HBGary to develop software that would allow the US government to "secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda."
[16][17] In 2022, the Stanford Internet Observatory and Graphika studied banned accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and five other social media platforms that used deceptive tactics to promote pro-Western narratives.
Vice News noted that "U.S. leaning social media influence campaigns are, ultimately, very similar to those run by adversarial countries.
",[23] while NBC News mentioned that "The campaigns used many of the same tactics that researchers frequently see in similar information operations aimed at denigrating the U.S. and its allies...those include creating fake personas with artificially generated profiles that had accounts across multiple platforms and creating fake news sites that frequently plagiarized articles from elsewhere on the internet.
[35][36] "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.
"[37] 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.
The video was "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.
[40] 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.
[43] 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.
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.
This has been carried out not only arguing how the invention of the television changed the make-up of households, but also how news outlets and the Internet have become powerful tools in pushing propaganda and selected information on consumers.
Flack on the other hand are those Chomsky proposes to be defamed by those in power or not even given access to a platform simply because their information is too critical or that it threatens ownership, advertisers and revenue in general.
With that said, the danger behind filtered information is highlighted in the sense that it creates “ideological polarization”- a phenomenon within a society that “has dominated both popular and academic debates” (Sphor 2017).
[48] A truly simplified example of this phenomenon would be the political system in the United States of America and the “self placement between…Democrats and Republicans” the key word in this context being self-placement, as society is grouped and divided into two schools of thoughts.
These statements mislead consumers who fail to take into account the shortcomings associated with products that are typically repressed in the advert while focusing on exaggerated features.
Name-calling has traditionally existed as a common technique in advertising, as it involves making statements that demean and undermine a competitor without necessarily being true.
Similarly, Burger King ran an ad that featured its sandwich “The Whopper” being bigger than the box that McDonald's uses in packing its “Big Mac” hamburger.
Notably, this strategy involves including influential people, as well as authority figures and experts, in adverts to attract the attention of consumers.
[57] A billboard containing the picture of a famous footballer holding a ball could, for instance, create the impression that the celebrity prefers the specific brand.
