Techniques · Family
Digital-era propaganda techniques
Techniques that need platforms, scale, or synthesis to exist.
- Algorithmic laundering Manufacturing enough activity around a claim on a platform that the platform's own systems promote it, so that it reaches the mainstream as "trending" or "viral" with its origin hidden.
- Bot amplification Using automated accounts to repeat, share, and boost a message, so that platforms and audiences read the manufactured volume as popularity.
- Brigading Organizing a group to descend on a target at once, with replies, reports, downvotes, or reviews, so that the target is silenced, buried, or driven off by sheer coordinated volume.
- Cheap fakes Genuine images or recordings altered with ordinary tools, slowed, sped up, cropped, spliced, or simply relabelled, so that they appear to show something they do not.
- Deepfakes Audio, video, or images generated or altered by machine learning to show a real person saying or doing something they did not, or to fabricate an event, with a realism that defeats casual inspection.
- Engagement bait Content built to provoke clicks, shares, comments, or reactions rather than to inform, so that the platform's ranking rewards it and the audience's attention is harvested.
- Fake reviews Reviews and ratings written or paid for by the seller, or against a rival, and presented as the independent experience of customers, so that the audience's trust in peers is spent on the seller's behalf.
- Firehose of falsehood Broadcasting a high volume of messages across many channels, rapidly, repetitively, and without regard for consistency or truth, so that the audience is overwhelmed rather than persuaded.
- Hashtag hijacking Seizing a hashtag, keyword, or search term associated with an opponent or a cause and flooding it with unrelated, hostile, or drowning content, so that the original conversation is captured or made unfindable.
- Meme warfare Using shareable, remixable images and jokes to carry a political message, so that the audience spreads the message for its humor and absorbs the claim without ever meeting it as an argument.
- Microtargeting Delivering different messages to different people based on data about them, invisibly to everyone else, so that each audience hears the version built to move it and no one can compare the versions.
- Rage farming Deliberately posting provocative or offensive content to generate angry responses, because the anger drives engagement, and the engagement drives reach and revenue.
- Sealioning Pursuing a target with relentless, polite requests for evidence and explanation, never accepting any answer, so that the target is exhausted or provoked and the questioner appears reasonable.
- Sock puppets Fictitious online identities operated by one person or organization to praise themselves, attack critics, or simulate independent agreement, so that one voice passes for several.
- Spoofed outlets Websites and accounts built to look like real news organizations, by imitation, a near-identical address, or a plausible local name, so that a message borrows a newsroom's credibility without a newsroom.
- Synthetic personas Fabricated people, with generated faces, invented biographies, and machine-written output, deployed as commentators, journalists, or experts, so that a message arrives from someone who does not exist.