Glossary of Propaganda and Media Literacy Terms

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Active measures The Soviet and later Russian intelligence term for covert political warfare: forgeries, planted stories, front organizations, and the cultivation of agents of influence, run as long campaigns to weaken an adversary from within. The ancestor of the modern influence operation.
Advertising Paid, identified persuasion on behalf of a product, service, or brand. The sponsor is named and the purpose is understood, which is what separates it from propaganda; the techniques are the same, and many were perfected by advertisers first.
Agitprop Political propaganda in the arts and in street-level campaigning, from the Soviet Department of Agitation and Propaganda. Agitation moves many people with a few ideas; propaganda moves a few people with many. Agitprop did both, through posters, theater, film, and trains.
Astroturf A campaign manufactured to look like a spontaneous grassroots movement: the letters, calls, petitions, reviews, or accounts that appear to come from ordinary people and are organized and paid for by an interested party. Named after the artificial grass.

Black propaganda Propaganda that lies about its source: a message presented as coming from the enemy, from a disaffected insider, or from an ordinary citizen when it comes from the propagandist. The hardest kind to counter, because the audience's usual defense, considering the source, has been turned against it.

Computational propaganda Propaganda that depends on software: automated accounts, algorithmic amplification, targeted advertising, and the data behind them, used to manipulate public opinion at a scale and speed no human operation could manage. The term from the Oxford Internet Institute's research program of the mid-2010s.
Counter-propaganda Communication designed to blunt an adversary's propaganda: exposing its source, correcting its claims, pre-empting its themes, or supplying the audience with the means to see through it. Distinct from simply running propaganda of one's own, though the line is often crossed.

Disinformation False information spread deliberately to deceive or to cause harm. The intent separates it from misinformation, which is false but spread in good faith, and the falsity separates it from propaganda, which need not be false at all.

Echo chamber An environment in which a person meets only views that agree with their own, so that those views are reinforced and opposing ones come to seem rare or absurd. In media, the self-selected diet of outlets and feeds that produces that effect; the related filter bubble is the version a recommendation system builds for you.

Framing The selection of some aspects of a situation and not others, so that the audience sees it as a particular kind of problem with a particular kind of solution. A frame is not a lie; it is a choice about what is in the picture, and it is the most common instrument of persuasion in daily use.

Gray propaganda Propaganda whose source is not identified, or is identified vaguely: the pamphlet with no imprint, the committee of "concerned citizens", the news story placed without a byline. The audience is left to guess, and usually guesses wrong in the propagandist's favor.

Influence operation An organized, usually covert effort by a state or other actor to shape opinion or behavior in a target population, by any combination of propaganda, deception, inauthentic accounts, and the cultivation of real voices. The term researchers use for the whole campaign rather than any one technique.
Information operations A military and, latterly, platform term for coordinated efforts to influence an audience through the information environment: propaganda, deception, cyber activity, and the disruption of an adversary's own communication, planned together.
Inoculation theory The finding, from William McGuire's experiments in the 1960s, that exposing people to a weakened version of an argument against their beliefs, along with a refutation, makes them more resistant to the full argument later. The medical analogy is deliberate, and the theory underlies prebunking.

Malinformation Information that is true, or based on something true, but used to cause harm: a private fact made public, a real document released out of context, a genuine photograph attached to a false caption. The third corner of the information-disorder taxonomy.
Manufacturing consent The idea that public agreement in a democracy is produced rather than found: by elites through the press, in Walter Lippmann's 1922 phrase "the manufacture of consent", or by the structure of the media itself, in Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's 1988 book of that title.
Media literacy The ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media of every kind, and to recognize how messages are built and for whom. The educational response to propaganda, and the subject that several American states now require schools to teach.
Misinformation False or misleading information spread without the intent to deceive: the forwarded rumor, the wrong figure, the misread study. Distinguished from disinformation by the sender's good faith, not by any difference in the content.

Narrative In communication, the story a message is part of: who the actors are, what the conflict is, how it will end. Strategists speak of "controlling the narrative" because facts are remembered through the story they are fitted into, and a fact that fits no story is soon forgotten.

Overton window The range of policies a politician can advocate without being thought extreme. Ideas inside the window are debatable; ideas outside it are not discussed. Moving the window, by making the formerly unthinkable sayable, is a strategic aim of much propaganda.

Persuasion Communication intended to change what someone believes, feels, or does. The wide category: it includes honest argument, advertising, and propaganda alike, and is distinguished from propaganda by whether the audience's judgment is engaged or bypassed.
Prebunking Warning an audience about a manipulation technique before it meets it, with a weakened example and a short explanation, so that the real thing is recognized when it arrives. Debunking after the fact, done in advance; the applied form of inoculation theory.
Propaganda Organized persuasion that works on an audience's feelings, loyalties, and habits of mind rather than on its judgment, to move it toward a conclusion that serves the source. It may carry true claims or false ones; what makes it propaganda is the method.
Psyop Psychological operations: the military's term for communication aimed at the attitudes and behavior of foreign audiences, from leaflets dropped on enemy lines to broadcasts and, now, social media. The techniques are those of propaganda; the word marks the institution using them.

Rhetoric The art of effective speaking and writing, and the study of how language persuades. In everyday use, often a dismissal: "mere rhetoric" means words in place of substance. The techniques on this site are rhetoric turned to a purpose the audience is not meant to notice.

Spin The favorable interpretation of events supplied by the people they concern: the press secretary explaining why a defeat was a victory, the company statement that calls a recall a commitment to quality. Persuasion by framing rather than by falsehood, and the everyday trade of political communication.

White propaganda Propaganda whose source is identified truthfully: a government poster with the government's name on it, a party broadcast, a company's advertisement. The audience knows who is speaking and can weigh the message accordingly.