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.
The term comes from the wartime services, which found that answering enemy propaganda point by point was slow, defensive, and often counter-productive, since repeating a claim to deny it spreads the claim. The alternatives they developed are still the main ones. Exposure names the source and its interest, which works against gray and black propaganda in particular. Correction supplies the missing facts, and works when the audience trusts the corrector. Pre-emption gets to the audience first with the frame the adversary will use, which is the ancestor of prebunking. Education teaches the techniques, so that the audience does its own analysis; that is the approach of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis and of this site.
Counter-propaganda has a built-in difficulty. It is run by people with their own interests, and the methods available to them are the same techniques they are countering. A government that exposes a foreign influence operation is also telling a story about itself. The honest form keeps to the first and fourth approaches, exposure and education, which give the audience information rather than a competing conclusion.
On this site, the counter-move on each technique page is counter-propaganda at the smallest scale: what one reader can do with one message.
Compare media literacy and inoculation theory.
Sources
- Taylor, Philip M. Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era. 3rd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.
- Cull, Nicholas J., David Culbert, and David Welch. Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500 to the Present. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2003. ISBN 978-1576078204