Techniques · Family
Structural propaganda techniques
Techniques that work through institutions, channels, and money.
- Astroturfing Manufacturing the appearance of spontaneous public support for a position, through paid letters, staged demonstrations, or fabricated accounts, so that an interested party's campaign looks like a movement.
- Censorship by noise Suppressing an unwelcome message not by blocking it but by burying it under a flood of other content, so that it is technically available and practically unfindable.
- Citation laundering Passing a claim through a chain of intermediaries, a report, a news story, a speech, a citation, until it acquires a respectable source that conceals where it started.
- Controlled opposition Creating, capturing, or funding a group that appears to oppose you, so that dissent flows into a channel you control and the real opposition is displaced or discredited.
- Divide and rule Setting the groups that might oppose you against each other, by favoring one, defining them against each other, or amplifying their differences, so that none has the strength or the inclination to act together.
- Front groups An organization created or funded by an interested party to speak in public under a neutral or civic name, so that the party's message arrives with someone else's credibility.
- Gatekeeping Controlling which information reaches the audience by controlling the channel it must pass through, so that what is withheld never has to be argued against.
- Greenwashing Spending more on presenting an organization as environmentally responsible than on being so, so that the audience's approval of the image substitutes for scrutiny of the record.
- Leak and plant Placing a message in the press through an unattributed leak or a story arranged to look independently reported, so that the audience receives it as news rather than as the interested party's statement.
- Manufactured consensus Producing the appearance that a view is generally held, through coordinated statements, selected voices, and suppression of dissent, so that the audience adopts it to avoid standing alone.
- Media capture Gaining control over the outlets that inform the public, by ownership, advertising, license, or favor, so that what they publish serves the controlling interest without anyone having to be told what to write.
- Message discipline Coordinating every speaker in an organization to repeat the same few phrases and avoid all others, so that the audience hears one voice from many mouths and takes the agreement for truth. 1 in the archive
- Native advertising Advertising designed to look like the editorial content around it, so that the audience reads a paid message with the trust it gives to independent reporting. 1 in the archive
- Paid expert Presenting as independent an expert whose opinion has been bought or shaped by the party it favors, so that the audience gives the opinion the weight of disinterested authority.
- Planted question Arranging for a question to be asked in a public forum by a confederate, so that the speaker can deliver a prepared answer while appearing to respond spontaneously to the public.
- Push polls A campaign contact disguised as an opinion survey, whose questions exist to plant a damaging claim about an opponent rather than to measure anything.
In the archive
Posters and advertisements annotated with techniques from this family.
