What Is Propaganda? Definition, Types, and the Seven Techniques

Propaganda is organized persuasion that works on an audience's feelings, loyalties, and habits of mind rather than on its judgment, in order to move it toward a conclusion that serves the source. It may carry true claims or false ones. What makes it propaganda is not the truth of the message but the method: the audience is handled, not informed.

A working definition

The word is used loosely, as an insult for any message the speaker dislikes, and precisely, in a literature that goes back a century. The precise sense is the useful one.

Harold Lasswell, writing in 1927 after the first war in which every government ran a propaganda office, defined it as the management of collective attitudes through the manipulation of significant symbols. Edward Bernays, who ran some of those offices and then sold the methods to industry, opened his 1928 book Propaganda by calling the conscious manipulation of the habits and opinions of the masses an ordinary feature of democratic society. Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell, whose textbook has been the standard for forty years, define it as a deliberate and systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior toward a response that furthers the propagandist's intent.

Three things are common to the serious definitions. Propaganda is deliberate: someone decided to produce it, and it is not a rumor or a mood. It is systematic: it is a campaign rather than a remark, and it uses whatever channels reach the audience. And it is one-sided in purpose: it exists to produce a response that serves the source, whether or not that response serves the audience. Whether the claims it carries are true is a separate question, and often beside the point. A great deal of effective propaganda consists of true statements, selected and arranged.

That last point is the one most people find surprising, and it is the reason this site exists. If propaganda were simply lying, the defense against it would be fact-checking. It is not simply lying. It is a set of techniques for getting a conclusion accepted without being examined, and the defense against it is to know the techniques.

Propaganda, persuasion, advertising, and public relations

Persuasion is the wide category. Every argument, every sales pitch, every sermon, and every op-ed is persuasion. Jowett and O'Donnell draw the line at who benefits: persuasion, in their account, is a transaction in which the persuader and the audience both have something to gain and the audience keeps its judgment, while propaganda serves the propagandist and treats the audience's judgment as an obstacle. The line is not always sharp, and a single message can cross it halfway through. But the test is a practical one. Ask whether the message would survive the audience thinking carefully about it. Persuasion invites that; propaganda is designed to make it unnecessary.

Advertising is persuasion with a product attached and a sponsor named. Most advertising is not propaganda by the strict definition, because its purpose is declared and its audience knows what is being asked. But advertising uses every technique in the catalog, and the techniques were in many cases refined by advertisers before governments borrowed them. The 1937 list of seven devices was illustrated as readily with cigarette advertisements as with speeches, and this site does the same: the commercial examples on each technique page are there because they are the clearest ones.

Public relations is the management of an organization's reputation and relationships. It was invented, as a named trade, by people who had run wartime propaganda and wanted a word that did not frighten clients. Bernays said as much. Public relations shades into propaganda at the point where the source is hidden: the front group that speaks for an industry without saying so, the expert whose fee is not mentioned, the grassroots movement that was planted. The techniques in the Structural family on this site are mostly public relations methods that cross that line.

Propaganda and misinformation

These words are not synonyms, and keeping them apart makes both more useful. The now-standard taxonomy, from Claire Wardle and Hossein Derakhshan's 2017 report for the Council of Europe, sorts information disorder by two questions: is it false, and is it meant to harm?

	Meant to harm	Not meant to harm
False	Disinformation	Misinformation
True	Malinformation	Information

Misinformation is false content spread without intent to harm: the forwarded rumor, the wrong date, the misread study. Disinformation is false content spread on purpose. Malinformation is true content used to harm, such as a private fact made public to discredit someone.

Propaganda cuts across all three. A propaganda campaign may use disinformation, and the biggest ones usually do, but it may equally run on true facts arranged to mislead, on emotional appeals that make no factual claim at all, or on sheer repetition. Conversely, a piece of misinformation is not propaganda until someone adopts it into a campaign. Propaganda is defined by method and purpose; misinformation and disinformation are defined by truth and intent. The glossary carries fuller entries on each.

White, gray, and black

A second distinction, older than the first, concerns the source. It was formalized by military analysts after the Second World War and is still the working vocabulary of the field.

White propaganda comes from a source that identifies itself correctly. 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. Most of the archive on this site is white propaganda, which is why it survived in public collections with its provenance intact.

Gray propaganda comes from a source that is not identified, or is identified vaguely. The pamphlet with no imprint, the "concerned citizens" group, the news story placed without a byline. The audience is left to guess, and the guess is usually wrong in the propagandist's favor.

Black propaganda comes from a source that lies about who it is. The classic cases are the British wartime radio stations that broadcast to Germany in German, posing as disaffected German soldiers; a modern case is a social media account run from one country that claims to be a local voice in another. Black propaganda is the hardest to counter, because the audience's usual defense, considering the source, has been turned against it.

The colors describe the source, not the content. A black station may broadcast true news, and often did, to build the credibility it would spend later. A white poster may be a tissue of falsehoods. Knowing the color tells you how much work you have to do to find out who is talking.

Where the word came from

The word is Latin and was once innocent. In 1622 Pope Gregory XV founded the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, to organize missionary work and to answer the Reformation. For two centuries propaganda meant that institution and, by extension, any organized spreading of a doctrine. It carried no suggestion of dishonesty; one propagated the faith as one propagated a plant.

The modern sense arrived with the First World War. Every belligerent built an apparatus for managing opinion at home, among allies, in neutral countries, and behind enemy lines. Britain's Wellington House, set up in 1914, worked through writers, press, and film while keeping its own existence secret. The United States' Committee on Public Information, created in April 1917 under George Creel, worked in the open and at enormous scale, with seventy-five thousand volunteer speakers and a poster program that fills a wing of the Library of Congress. Germany's effort was blamed, after the war, for not matching them. When the war ended and the methods were described in memoirs and official histories, the public learned how thoroughly it had been managed, and the word turned sour. By the 1930s propaganda meant manipulation, and the regimes that used it most openly, Germany's Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda from 1933 and the Soviet state's departments of agitation and propaganda, confirmed the meaning.

The men who had run the democratic efforts went into business. Walter Lippmann described the manufacture of consent in Public Opinion in 1922 and worried about it; Bernays described it in Crystallizing Public Opinion the next year and sold it. The techniques that had sold war bonds were put to selling cigarettes, bacon, and candidates. The methods did not change when the word did.

The Institute for Propaganda Analysis and the seven techniques

By 1937 the alarm was general. Radio had given a single voice access to every living room; the dictators were using it; and a radio priest in Detroit, Father Charles Coughlin, had an audience of millions for broadcasts that were increasingly antisemitic. A group of educators and social scientists, led by Clyde Miller of Teachers College, Columbia, founded the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in New York to teach the public, and particularly schoolchildren, to recognize what they were hearing.

The Institute's monthly bulletin, Propaganda Analysis, carried in its second issue, November 1937, a short article called "How to Detect Propaganda". It named seven devices:

Name Calling: attaching a bad label to an idea or a person so that it is rejected without examination.
Glittering Generalities: attaching a virtue word so that it is accepted without examination.
Transfer: carrying the authority or prestige of something respected over to the thing being sold.
Testimonial: having a respected or hated person endorse or condemn.
Plain Folks: presenting the speaker as one of the people.
Card Stacking: selecting the facts and arguments that help one side.
Bandwagon: the claim that everyone is doing it, so you should too.

The list was deliberately short, deliberately plain, and written to be taught to teenagers. It went into school curricula across the country, and it has never left them. Alfred and Elizabeth Lee expanded it into a book, The Fine Art of Propaganda, in 1939, using Coughlin's own broadcasts as the worked examples. The Institute closed in 1942, partly for want of money and partly because, with the country at war, analyzing propaganda had become awkward.

The seven hold up. They are incomplete, as any list of seven would be, and later writers have added to them, but almost every technique described since can be traced to one of them or to a gap between two. On this site they form the first family, called Classic, and the index offers a view that sets them against everything added since.

How this site groups the techniques

The catalog holds over a hundred techniques in seven families. The families are not a theory of propaganda; they are a filing system, chosen so that a reader can find a technique by what it feels like from the receiving end.

Classic is the seven of 1937. Appeals are the techniques that work on an emotion or an identity rather than on the claim: fear, pride, belonging, grievance, nostalgia. Language is the family of word choice: euphemism, loaded terms, slogans, the thought-terminating cliché. Framing and omission covers what is left out and how the rest is arranged: cherry-picking, false balance, the straw man, the false dilemma. Structural techniques work through institutions, channels, and money, and are mostly invisible in any single message: front groups, astroturfing, message discipline, gatekeeping. Digital-era techniques need platforms, scale, or synthesis to exist at all: bot amplification, brigading, the firehose of falsehood, deepfakes. Visual techniques are carried by the image rather than the text: scale, cropping, juxtaposition, the staged photograph.

Every technique page describes the mechanism, names the cognitive bias or the logical fallacy it exploits, with a link to the entry on logicalfallacies.org, gives cited historical and commercial examples, and ends with a short quiz. The archive then shows the techniques at work: posters and advertisements from public collections with numbered pins at the spot where each technique is doing its job.

How to recognize it

No checklist replaces knowing the techniques, but a short one catches most cases.

Who is speaking, and do they say so? If the source is vague, missing, or implausible, start there.
What am I being asked to feel? Propaganda usually leads with an emotion and follows with a conclusion. Name the emotion, then look at the conclusion on its own.
What is missing? The strongest technique in the catalog is omission. Ask what a fair opponent would say, and whether the message has given you any way to find out.
Would this survive a careful reading? Slogans, labels, and appeals to the crowd are built to be accepted at speed. Slow down and they often fall apart.
Is the number of believers being offered as the reason to believe? Popularity is evidence of popularity.
Am I being told that questioning this is disloyal, naive, or dangerous? That is a technique, and it has a page.

The site's quiz presents an example and asks which technique is at work; it is the fastest way to make the catalog stick. The reference card puts the seven, or the full set, on one printable page.

A note on judgment

Recognizing propaganda is not the same as dismissing the message. A true claim can be sold with a dishonest technique, and a cause can be just and badly argued. The habit this site tries to build is narrower and more useful: to notice the technique, set it aside, and look at what is left. Sometimes what is left is a good argument. Sometimes there is nothing there at all. Either way, the decision is yours again, which is the whole point.

Questions

Is propaganda always false?

No. Much of the most effective propaganda is made of true statements, selected and arranged so that the audience draws a conclusion the facts do not support. The mark of propaganda is the method, not the truth of the claims.

Is advertising propaganda?

Usually not in the strict sense, because advertising names its sponsor and declares its purpose. But advertising uses the same techniques, and many of them were refined by advertisers first. The commercial examples on each technique page are there because they are the clearest.

What is the difference between propaganda and persuasion?

Persuasion is the wide category and includes honest argument. Propaganda is persuasion that serves the source and treats the audience's judgment as an obstacle to get round rather than a faculty to engage. A practical test is whether the message would survive the audience thinking carefully about it.

What is the difference between misinformation and disinformation?

Misinformation is false content spread without intent to harm; disinformation is false content spread on purpose. Propaganda may use either, or neither, since it can run on true facts, emotional appeals, or repetition alone.

What are the seven propaganda techniques?

Name-calling, glittering generalities, transfer, testimonial, plain folks, card stacking, and bandwagon, as listed by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis in November 1937. They form the Classic family on this site, and each has its own page.

Where does the word propaganda come from?

From the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, founded by Pope Gregory XV in 1622. The word meant organized spreading of a doctrine, with no suggestion of dishonesty, until the First World War gave it its modern sense.

What are white, gray, and black propaganda?

Labels for the source, not the content. White propaganda identifies its source truthfully, gray propaganda leaves the source unclear, and black propaganda lies about where it comes from.

Is propaganda illegal?

In most countries, no. Specific acts can be illegal, such as fraud, defamation, incitement, election offenses, or undisclosed foreign lobbying, and platforms have their own rules about coordinated inauthentic behavior. Propaganda as such is a method, and methods are not crimes.

Can propaganda be used for good?

Public health campaigns, road safety, and wartime morale all use the techniques, and some of the best-known posters in the archive were made for causes most people would support. The techniques are the same whatever the cause, which is why it is worth knowing them.

How many techniques does this site describe?

Over a hundred, in seven families. The index lists them by family, alphabetically, against the seven of 1937, and by the era in which each was first documented.

Sources

Lasswell, Harold D. "The Theory of Political Propaganda." American Political Science Review 21, no. 3 (1927): 627–631.
Lasswell, Harold D. Propaganda Technique in the World War. London: Kegan Paul, 1927.
Bernays, Edward L. Propaganda. New York: Horace Liveright, 1928.
Bernays, Edward L. Crystallizing Public Opinion. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923.
Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922.
Jowett, Garth S., and Victoria O'Donnell. Propaganda and Persuasion. 7th ed. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2019. ISBN 978-1506371344
Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. Translated by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner. New York: Knopf, 1965.
Institute for Propaganda Analysis. "How to Detect Propaganda." Propaganda Analysis 1, no. 2 (November 1937).
Lee, Alfred McClung, and Elizabeth Briant Lee. The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin's Speeches. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939.
Sproule, J. Michael. Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Wardle, Claire, and Hossein Derakhshan. Information Disorder: Toward an Interdisciplinary Framework for Research and Policymaking. Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2017. https://rm.coe.int/information-disorder-toward-an-interdisciplinary-framework-for-researc/168076277c
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.
Creel, George. How We Advertised America. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1920.
Sanders, M. L., and Philip M. Taylor. British Propaganda during the First World War, 1914–18. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Howe, Ellic. The Black Game: British Subversive Operations against the Germans during the Second World War. London: Michael Joseph, 1982.