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.
Gray is the working color of peacetime propaganda. It does not lie about the source, which would be black, and it does not declare it, which would be white. It leaves the question open and lets the audience assume the most credible answer.
Most of the Structural family on this site lives in the gray zone. A front group with an institutional name and an unmentioned funder is gray. A Paid Expert whose fee is not disclosed is gray. Native Advertising is gray by design, dressed to be mistaken for the surrounding journalism. Citation Laundering, in which a claim is passed through enough respectable-looking hands that its origin disappears, is a method for turning black into gray.
During the Cold War, both sides ran gray channels: radio stations, publishing houses, and cultural foundations whose funding was concealed from their own staff as well as their audiences. The pattern is the same online, where the question "who is behind this account" is the first one an analyst asks and the one the account is built to leave unanswered.
The defense is the question itself. If a message does not say where it comes from, that is information.
Sources
- Jowett, Garth S., and Victoria O'Donnell. Propaganda and Persuasion. 7th ed. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2019. ISBN 978-1506371344
- Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: New Press, 1999. ISBN 978-1565846647