What is Propaganda and How to Spot It So You Won't Be Misinformed
To begin this entry, I’d like to say that I found this excellent essay on the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I wished I had found before I wrote my last post about that same issue. It's still worth reading anyway.
For this entry, I’m going to provide a basic introduction to propaganda. The Wikipedia defines propaganda as “communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented.”
An objective news story or documentary or other forms of mass media seeks only to provide all of the facts of the information that is being provided in an impartial way so the person watching or reading the story can make up his or her mind about the story or form his/her own opinions on a certain issue. Propaganda provides only one point of view of a certain piece of information in a way that’s designed to make people emotional and spur them into action. Propaganda tends to be far more manipulative than a typical news story that’s presented in an objective yet factual way.
Technically advertising could be considered as a form of propaganda because emotionally-charged ads exist to convince the consumer to watch the latest movies or purchase the latest appliances, electronic gadgets, toys, clothes, books, household cleaning products, or other consumer goods from a store. But generally propaganda is defined as a method to influence opinions and beliefs regarding religion and/or politics while the term advertising is strictly limited to influencing the purchase of a product or service.
Too often propaganda is presented in such a heavy-handed way that it backfires on the intended audience, who will laugh and jeer at what is being presented. That is especially true in societies that have freedom of speech, which leads to a free-flow of all kinds of ideas so a person who is used to being exposed to different viewpoints is more likely to be savvy at detecting propaganda.
One such example of heavy-handed propaganda is a film that was made in 1936 called Reefer Madness. It was originally financed by a church group that was supposed to educate parents about the dangers of marijuana use, especially among teenagers. After the movie was finished, it was purchased by exploitation filmmaker Dwain Esper, who added more salacious footage and distributed it on the exploitation films circuit throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The film depicted teenagers who took one puff of a marijuana joint then do things like flunking out of school, becoming axe murderers or even taking off their clothes and having sex orgies with two or more people. While the film may have initially shocked and horrified audiences in the 1930s and 1940s, by the 1970s it was discovered by a new generation of young people, many of whom had actually tried marijuana so they ended up laughing at the film’s heavy-handed depiction of the dangers of smoking marijuana. Today Reefer Madness is considered to be a campy cult classic that’s good for a laugh and not to be taken seriously, which is the opposite of what the original filmmakers intended. You can now view Reefer Madness for free on YouTube.
Heavy-handed propaganda tends to be more successful in authoritarian countries where the flow of alternate information is severely limited. In North Korea, for example, the government can get away with presenting heavy-handed propaganda that’s presented in stark black and white terms like “North Korea good. US/South Korea/Japan/Other Western Nations bad.” because the native North Korea media is heavily censored and it is a serious criminal offense to receive foreign media from outside of North Korea.
Within propaganda are two different types that you should be aware of—Whataboutism and Projectionism.
Whataboutism is a technique that was perfected in the old Soviet Union. If you criticized an event that was happening in the old USSR, government officials would counter it by throwing up an event that happened in the Western world without addressing the original grievance that happened in the Soviet Union.
Here’s a hypothetical situation of how Whataboutism could be used. In 1968 a Russian man living in Moscow decides to risk arrest and protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that year. He makes a sign and protests in Red Square. He gets arrested for his protest. During the interrogation when the man is asked why he protested he’ll say “I think it’s wrong for the Soviet Union to send tanks to Prague. The people of Czechoslovakia should have the right to self-determination.” The interrogator would respond with “What about the fact that the US sent the CIA to Iran in order to help orchestrate the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953?” The man would respond with “But it’s wrong for the USSR to send troops to Czechoslovakia. The people living in Czechoslovakia should have the right to self-determination.” The interrogator would respond with “What about the fact that the US has sent troops to South Vietnam even though the Vietnamese people wanted to reunite South Vietnam with North Vietnam? Don’t the Vietnamese have a right to self-determination as well?” Every time the man talks about how wrong it is for the Soviet Union to invade Czechoslovakia, his statements are always met with “What about…” along with an unrelated event that happened in the West.
The whole idea is to grind and belittle the person making the statements and ultimately wear down that person. It gets to the point where the person thinks it’s futile to mention his/her beliefs because they will be countered with “What about…” It ends up silencing that person.
Projectionism (which is also known as Accusation in a Mirror) is another type of propaganda where you accuse your opponent of doing something that you are actually guilty of doing yourself.
Here’s a hypothetical example: Two men named Gus and Max decide to run for the same open seat that’s available on the local council of the small town where they live. Gus is running as a Republican and Max is running as a Democrat. Both Gus and Max are successful local businessmen who have a long history of volunteering for nonprofit groups. But Gus has one secret that he’s trying to keep under wraps: He is a closeted pedophile who has molested children under the age of 12. He has managed to keep his victims silent through the use of such things as bribery and threats.
Gus notices that Max spends six months of the year as a coach for the local youth soccer league. Gus uses Max’s position to accuse Max of being a pedophile despite the fact that a background check will show that Max has a clean record. Gus is openly making that accusation in an effort to discredit Max and get voters to vote for him in the upcoming local election. Even though Gus is the actual child molester, he is using his experience as a child molester to project those experiences on to Max despite Max being completely innocent.
The Russian accusation against Ukraine being ruled by Nazis is a classic case of protectionism at work. Russia may accuse Ukraine of being a Nazi state but it is Russia who has chosen to use the letter Z as a modern-day version of the Nazi swastika. (Like the swastika, which was culturally appropriated from Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, the letter Z was culturally appropriated from the Latin alphabet that’s used in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Polish, Czech, and many other languages. The letter Z does not exist in the Cyrillic alphabet that’s used by the Russian and Ukrainian languages.) It is Russia who has filtration camps which are little more than modern-day concentration camps. It is Russia who has launched its war of aggression against Ukraine just like when Nazi Germany began World War II by launching wars of aggression against countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia.
With the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the Kremlin is definitely going into overdrive on the propaganda. The Kremlin produces propaganda that are designed for two different audiences—internal propaganda and external propaganda.
Internal propaganda is created solely for people who live inside of Russia and it is made in the Russian language. The best place to view this propaganda so you can educate yourself is on the NFKRZ YouTube channel. Roman, a Russian man who’s currently living in exile in Georgia, does English translations of the worst of the internal propaganda that the Russian people are actually exposed to while making his own snarky commentary, such as this recent video. It was through the NFKRZ channel that I learned about the existence of a Russian pop singer known as Shaman whose songs mostly praise Vladimir Putin and Russia, such as the current Russian pop hit “Moy Boy”, which is translated as “My Fight” in English and “Mein Kampf” in German (with the latter translation also being the name of that infamous book that was written by Adolf Hitler).
Other excellent places to view translated Russian propaganda are through two accounts on Twitter/X. One is Julia Davis News and the other is Anton Gerashenko. They don’t provide the hilarious snark of the NFKRZ YouTube Channel but you’ll still get an idea of what Russians are exposed to on a daily basis from their own government.
Internal propaganda is even filtered through the school system. One example is a Russian textbook that was recently rewritten to claim that West Germany had annexed East Germany instead of the historical truth about how the communist regime fell in East Germany and, in the immediate aftermath, both German republics mutually decided to reunite as one single nation for the first time since the end of World War II.
Recently the Russian feminist art collective Pussy Riot released their latest music video called “Swan Lake,” which is their statement against the propaganda that is being distributed in Russian society.
External propaganda is created for people who live outside of Russia and it tends to be made in English so it is more accessible to the targeted audience. Many times the Kremlin will try to learn about the history and culture of the targeted audience so its propaganda will be more attractive to the intended audience. The propaganda will frequently use flashy graphics or catchy music to attract their intended audience.
This Substack is more focused on external propaganda because much of it is not only reaching in the United States (where I live) but in a number of other countries as well. This type of propaganda has the potential of convincing people that their own government is lying to them and that Russia is the victim who is only fighting back against perpetual victimhood. These newly convinced people are more likely to vote, convince their elected officials to vote in a certain way on legislation, protest on the streets, and even distribute leaflets at events (such as street fairs) that has Russian talking points on certain issues. This could have an adverse effect on not only the United States but throughout the rest of the world as well as more countries could install authoritarian governments instead of democratic governments. Authoritarian governments are more likely to severely curtail civil liberties such as access to abortion and birth control, the rights of LGBTQ people, the right of people to freely worship however they choose, women’s rights, the civil rights of ethnic minorities, and much more.
English-language Russian propaganda can be found through both its RT television network (which can now be only found online since many countries have shut that station down after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine last year) and its Sputnik radio network (which is also mostly found online). But those aren’t the only places where English-language Russian propaganda can be found.
Russia utilizes troll farms that have names like the Internet Research Agency where they create scores of fake accounts (known as “bots”) on social media sites and post online propaganda. Sometimes these fake accounts can be spotted because they’ll use a first name followed by a bunch of numbers (such as “Jenny8675309”). Sometimes there might be no profile picture while other times there might be a random picture of a person’s head that has either been swiped from another real social media account or created using artificial intelligence graphics creation apps. Usually they have been created within the last six months and they may not have too many posts or 99 percent of their posts are reposts of other people’s posts.
In 2016 Samantha Bee traveled to Moscow to interview two Russians who were getting paid to make posts on social media in an effort to affect the outcome of the presidential elections that year. Their effort was ultimately successful that year because Donald Trump was elected president even though polls in the US had consistently shown that Hillary Clinton was in the lead.
Additionally there are real people in the West who are actually sympathetic with what Vladimir Putin is doing in Russia that they willingly spend time making online posts that praise Putin and Russia. Some of them are true believers in Putin’s Russia while others are only doing it in the hopes of making money and/or becoming famous. In any case, there is newly declassified US intel that claims that Russia is laundering propaganda through unwitting Westerners. In the future I’ll highlight some of these Western pro-Putin propagandists so you’ll become familiar with them and learn not to take them as serious sources of information.
What to do if you suspect that this information is really Russian propaganda? First, look at the poster’s name and account. If the poster has only a first name and a string of numbers, the account was created less than six months ago, with no profile pic, chances are that it may be a bot.
If the account looks legitimate, take at look at what the person claims and do a quick Google search. If the claim is real, it will turn up as news on most of the mainstream news sites from around the world. If the claim is not real, it will either not turn up on Google at all or it might turn up on some obscure website that is claiming to be a news site but chances are that you have never heard of it before (like The Joe Blow Report or Real Honest News or Honest Real News or Actual News or something like that). Most of these obscure websites claiming to be news sites should be viewed with suspicion because anyone with an Internet connection can put up a website using free hosting sites (such as Wix.com or WordPress.com), purchase a domain name, and claim to be a news site. That person could then write stories while claiming to be a “journalist” without having to deal with an editor who would grill an actual reporter and do fact-checking in an effort to make sure that an upcoming story has all of the facts before being printed/broadcast/posted online.
Some mainstream news sites that you can use to see if a claim is real include ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, CNN, NPR, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CBC News, BBC News, DW, France 24, Al Jazeera, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and Bellingcat. If a claim is corroborated on two or more of those sites, it means that it is true.
Here are some sites that I don’t recommend using unless you are curious about the views of the Kremlin, the far right wing, and the far left wing. The aforementioned RT and Sputnik are official Kremlin media outlets. Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, Sinclair, Breitbart, InfoWars, and The Blaze promote the right wing viewpoint so much that they will sometimes exaggerate an actual event to the extent that it doesn’t reflect what really happened in real life. On the left wing there is MintPress News, The Grayzone, and World Socialist Web Site, which all tend to promote the pro-Kremlin viewpoint.
If you’re a very busy person and you don’t have the time to constantly conduct your own Google searches, there is a site that will do it for you. Ground News is a news aggregation app and website that will not only compile a list of news sites that are reporting on a certain topic but it will also show the biases of a certain site in terms of whether the site leans to the left, to the right, or is it just an objective site. There is a free version which has basic features and a subscription version where you can get even more in-depth analysis of a certain news story.
My blog is free to subscribe but if you want to make a comment, you’ll need to take out a paid subscription, which only costs $8 per month. I know it costs as much as a subscription to Twitter/X Blue but at least I have no contacts with anyone even remotely connected to Vladimir Putin’s government. ;-)