Propaganda: from the sacred to the algorithmic The word itself is older than most people realise. Propaganda comes from the Latin propagare — to propagate, to spread. It entered formal use in 1622 when Pope Gregory XV established the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith), a Vatican body created to coordinate Catholic missionary work in the wake of the Reformation. So yes — the Church didn’t just use propaganda, they effectively named it.
The impulse behind it, of course, is ancient. Egyptian pharaohs carved victories into stone and erased the names of predecessors. Roman emperors stamped their faces on coins across an empire. The Iliad was partly a glorification of Mycenaean heroism. Every ruling power has understood that controlling the story is as important as controlling the territory.
What propaganda actually is
At its core, propaganda is the deliberate, systematic shaping of perception, belief, or behaviour in service of a particular agenda — political, religious, commercial, or ideological. What separates it from mere communication or education is the combination of intent to persuade with strategic framing that downplays, distorts, or excludes inconvenient truths.
Scholars like Jacques Ellul (Propagandes, 1962) argued that propaganda is not an aberration of modern society but one of its structural features — that any mass society generates it because coordinated behaviour at scale requires coordinated belief. Harold Lasswell, an early political scientist, identified its basic mechanics: who says what, through which channel, to whom, with what effect. The technology changes. The logic doesn’t.
Who uses it
Everyone with power and something to protect — or gain. States are the obvious actors: every government in history has managed its narrative. Wartime posters, controlled newsreels, official histories. The Soviet Union ran disinformation as a formal intelligence operation called dezinformatsiya. The United States funded Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, produced Hollywood epics saturated with American values, and later established the CIA’s Mockingbird programme, which secretly subsidised journalists and cultural institutions during the Cold War.
But propaganda is not exclusively governmental. Corporations use it — Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, effectively invented the modern public relations industry in the 1920s by applying mass psychology to commercial persuasion. He convinced Americans that bacon and eggs was a healthy breakfast (on behalf of a pork company), and rebranded cigarettes as feminist symbols of liberation (for the tobacco industry). He called it “the engineering of consent.”
Religions use it — the Church’s 1622 congregation wasn’t unique; it simply formalised what religious institutions had always done: spread a message, suppress heresy, manage the faithful’s interpretation of the world. Every major faith tradition has produced inspirational art, architecture, music, and literature explicitly designed to create emotional and cognitive alignment with doctrine.
Social movements use it. So do political parties, NGOs, terrorist organisations, pharmaceutical companies, sports franchises, and universities. Propaganda is not the exclusive property of villains — it’s a technique, and like all techniques, its moral weight depends on what it serves.
The mechanics: six core tools
Propaganda works through a surprisingly consistent toolkit across all eras:
- Emotional bypassing — appealing to fear, pride, love, or disgust rather than reason. The amygdala responds faster than the prefrontal cortex, and skilled propagandists have always known this.
- Repetition — Goebbels was explicit: a lie repeated often enough becomes accepted truth. Modern neuroscience confirms the “illusory truth effect” — familiarity breeds belief.
- Us vs. them — defining an in-group (noble, threatened, righteous) against an out-group (dangerous, alien, corrupt). The simplest and most durable structure in the toolkit.
- Manufactured authority — uniforms, experts, institutions, statistics. Credibility laundering through the appearance of objectivity.
- Simplification — complex realities reduced to slogans, symbols, and vivid images. This is not always dishonest, but it always excludes.
- Normalisation — the gradual saturation of a worldview until it becomes invisible as ideology and appears simply as common sense.
The algorithmic turn
What has changed in the digital age is not the technique but the scale, speed, and surgical precision of delivery. Social media platforms optimise for engagement, and engagement is disproportionately driven by outrage, fear, and tribal identity — precisely the emotional registers that propaganda has always exploited. The difference is that the old propagandist had to reach everyone with one message. Today, a political operation can micro-target individuals with personalised messaging tailored to their specific psychological profile, browsing history, and social graph — simultaneously, at virtually no marginal cost.
Deepfakes, AI-generated content, coordinated inauthentic behaviour, and algorithmic amplification have compressed the propaganda cycle from months to hours. The challenge for citizens is not simply to resist propaganda but to recognise it in an environment designed to make that recognition as difficult as possible.
What to do with it
Media literacy — the ability to ask who made this, what do they want me to feel, what have they left out, and what is the source — is the foundational counter-technology. Not scepticism as a permanent state of paralysis, but critical inquiry as a reflex. The propagandist’s greatest victory is not persuasion but the collapse of the audience’s belief that truth is findable at all.
Propaganda has always been with us. What changes is whether we notice it.
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