Propaganda

Propaganda is a type of mass communication aimed at swaying an audience to support a particular cause. It is not necessarily objective and often picks and chooses facts to shape a specific viewpoint, or relies on emotionally charged language to provoke a feeling rather than a reasoned judgment. Propaganda appears in many different settings.

Since the 1900s, the English word "propaganda" has taken on a manipulative connotation, but it was once a neutral term for any material promoting certain opinions or ideas. The messages are delivered through a variety of media, which have evolved with technology: paintings, cartoons, posters, pamphlets, films, radio, television, and websites. In the digital age, new methods have emerged, such as computational propaganda, where bots and algorithms spread fake or biased news on social media or use chatbots to impersonate real people in online discussions.

The word comes from modern Latin, the neuter plural gerundive of *propagare*, meaning "to spread" or "to propagate," so propaganda literally means "things to be propagated." It originally referred to a Catholic Church administrative body created in 1622 during the Counter-Reformation, the *Congregatio de Propaganda Fide* (Congregation for Propagating the Faith), which aimed to spread Catholicism in non-Catholic lands. By the 1790s, the term was also used for secular activities, and it gained its modern sense of spreading information to advance a cause or movement in 1929. Some non-English equivalents, like the Chinese term *xuanchuan*, can be neutral or positive in official discourse, though they may be used negatively in protest or informal settings.

Historian Arthur Aspinall noted that in the late 1700s, newspapers were not seen as independent sources of information but were expected to promote the views of their owners or government backers. In the 20th century, propaganda grew alongside mass media like newspapers and radio. Researchers used suggestion theory to explain how emotionally resonant messages could influence people. Harold Lasswell broadly defined propaganda as "the expression of opinions or actions carried out deliberately by individuals or groups with a view to influencing the opinions or actions of other individuals or groups for predetermined ends and through psychological manipulations." Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell see propaganda and persuasion as linked, with humans using communication as a form of soft power through propaganda materials.

In a 1929 debate, Everett Dean Martin argued that propaganda turns people into puppets, moved by hidden strings the propagandist controls. In the 1920s and 1930s, propaganda was sometimes seen as all-powerful. Edward Bernays wrote that the deliberate manipulation of mass habits and opinions is a key part of democratic society, and that those who control this unseen mechanism form an invisible government that truly rules. NATO’s 2011 guidance for military public affairs defines propaganda as information or appeals spread to influence the opinions, emotions, attitudes, or behavior of a group to benefit the sponsor. More recently, the RAND Corporation coined "firehose of falsehood" to describe how modern communication allows a flood of messages to be broadcast rapidly, repeatedly, and across many channels, regardless of truth or consistency.

Propaganda has existed since recorded history began. In ancient Egypt’s New Kingdom, the state used a "Clean Victory" ideology to prioritize cosmic order over factual war reporting. Temple reliefs sanitized warfare by omitting violence against civilians, showing the Pharaoh as a disciplined protector. Ramesses II reframed the Battle of Kadesh, a stalemate, as a divine personal victory. Artists used hierarchical scaling to make the king appear giant, and motifs like "smiting the enemy" symbolized his triumph over chaos. The Behistun Inscription (around 515 BCE), which details Darius I’s rise to the Persian throne, is widely seen as early propaganda. Another example comes from the last Roman civil wars (44–30 BCE), when Octavian and Mark Antony traded insults about each other’s origins, cruelty, cowardice, and debauchery, using the Roman rhetorical genre of invective to shape public opinion.