New Approaches to the Mechanisms of Propaganda

The post-lunch session at IAMCR 2024 starts with the great Christian Baden, who begins by noting that propaganda has become a substantially growing concern again in recent years. Propaganda is more than just ‘fake news’, of course: it may provide actual facts, but out of context or with a biased spin, for example, and false information is often only used around the margins to enhance the propagandistic effect and establish epistemic authority.

Propaganda is therefore defined here as strategically planned public communication on political issues that claims a monopoly of truth and delegitimises dissent. This extends well beyond specific contexts (e.g. crisis or war), beyond domestic politics, and beyond authoritarian regimes; it also applies in a high-choice digital information environment, where audiences have access to a plethora of competing claims.

The question in such environments is therefore not what people are exposed to, but what they regard as believable and significant. This is a choice, and specific individuals and groups will make very one-sided selections of the information they take in and accept as part of their worldview. This takes place on a number of levels: at the level of the enduring meta narrative that governs their story world and determines their normative polarity; at the level of adaptive communication campaigns, which focus on what needs to be argued in practice right now and provide resonant explanations for salient concerns as well as offer identity defences and behavioural directions; and at the lowest level of day-to-day (dis)information flows, which responds directly to current news events and promotes tactical mobilisation or demobilisation.

This, then, enables individuals to engage in ‘evidence’-based information screening – based on their worldview they are able to dismiss out of hand any information which does not accord with the facts they fervently believe in; source-based information filtering, where information is dismissed simply based on who published it; and resonance-based information screening, where information is dismissed if it does not resonate with core beliefs and identities.

Propaganda exploits a social mechanism which is based on the perception of threats to one’s own identity, and leads us to publicly assert our own identity; this provides ontological security, leads to a performance of loyalty, and requires us to apologise for any transgressions against this identity. What results from this is a culturally embedded monopoly of truth.

Much of this, then, is about narratives rather than reality, and we need to understand how such narratives are sustained by propaganda as a long-term social process.