thesis statement about propaganda

Special Issue: Propaganda

This essay was published as part of the Special Issue “Propaganda Analysis Revisited”, guest-edited by Dr. A. J. Bauer (Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism and Creative Media, University of Alabama) and Dr. Anthony Nadler (Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Media Studies, Ursinus College).

Propaganda, misinformation, and histories of media techniques

Article metrics.

CrossRef Citations

Altmetric Score

PDF Downloads

This essay argues that the recent scholarship on misinformation and fake news suffers from a lack of historical contextualization. The fact that misinformation scholarship has, by and large, failed to engage with the history of propaganda and with how propaganda has been studied by media and communication researchers is an empirical detriment to it, and serves to make the solutions and remedies to misinformation harder to articulate because the actual problem they are trying to solve is unclear.

School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds, UK

Introduction

Propaganda has a history and so does research on it. In other words, the mechanisms and methods through which media scholars have sought to understand propaganda—or misinformation, or disinformation, or fake news, or whatever you would like to call it—are themselves historically embedded and carry with them underlying notions of power and causality. To summarize the already quite truncated argument below, the larger conceptual frameworks for understanding information that is understood as “pernicious” in some way can be grouped into four large categories: studies of propaganda, the analysis of ideology and its relationship to culture, notions of conspiracy theory, and finally, concepts of misinformation and its impact. The fact that misinformation scholarship generally proceeds without acknowledging these theoretical frameworks is an empirical detriment to it and serves to make the solutions and remedies to misinformation harder to articulate because the actual problem to be solved is unclear. 

The following pages discuss each of these frameworks—propaganda, ideology, conspiracy, and misinformation—before returning to the stakes and implications of these arguments for future research on pernicious media content.

Propaganda and applied research

The most salient aspect of propaganda research is the fact that it is powerful in terms of resources while at the same time it is often intellectually derided, or at least regularly dismissed. Although there has been a left-wing tradition of propaganda research housed uneasily within the academy (Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Seldes & Seldes, 1943), this is not the primary way in which journalism or media messaging has been understood in many journalism schools or mainstream communications departments. This relates, of course, to the institutionalization of journalism and communication studies within the academic enterprise. Within this paradox, we see the greater paradox of communication research as both an applied and a disciplinary field. Propaganda is taken quite seriously by governments, the military, and the foreign service apparatus (Simpson, 1994); at the same time, it has occupied a tenuous conceptual place in most media studies and communications departments, with the dominant intellectual traditions embracing either a “limited effects” notion of what communication “does” or else more concerned with the more slippery concept of ideology (and on that, see more below). There is little doubt that the practical study of the power of messages and the field of communication research grew up together. Summarizing an initially revisionist line of research that has now become accepted within the historiography of the field, Nietzel notes that “from the very beginning, communication research was at least in part designed as an applied science, intended to deliver systematic knowledge that could be used for the business of government to the political authorities.” He adds, however, that

“this context also had its limits, for by the end of the decade, communication research had become established at American universities and lost much of its dependence on state funds. Furthermore, it had become increasingly clear that communication scientists could not necessarily deliver knowledge to the political authorities that could serve as a pattern for political acting (Simpson, 1994 pp. 88–89). From then on, politics and communication science parted ways. Many of the approaches and techniques which seemed innovative and even revolutionary in the 1940s and early 1950s, promising a magic key to managing propaganda activities and controlling public opinion, became routine fields of work, and institutions like the USIA carried out much of this kind of research themselves.” (Nietzel, 2016, p. 66)

It is important to note that this parting of ways did  not  mean that no one in the United States and the Soviet Union was studying propaganda. American government records document that, in inflation-adjusted terms, total funding for the United States Information Agency (USIA) rose from $1.2 billion in 1955 to $1.7 billion in 1999, shortly before its functions were absorbed into the United States Department of State. And this was dwarfed by Soviet spending, which spent more money jamming Western Radio transmissions alone than the United States did in its entire propaganda budget. Media effects research in the form of propaganda studies was a big and well-funded business. It was simply not treated as such within the traditional academy (Zollman, 2019). It is also important to note that this does not mean that no one in academia studies propaganda or the effect of government messages on willing or unwilling recipients, particularly in fields like health communication (also quite well-funded). These more academic studies, however, were tempered by the generally accepted fact that there existed no decontextualized, universal laws of communication that could render media messages easily useable by interested actors.

Ideology, economics, and false consciousness

If academics have been less interested than governments and health scientists in analyzing the role played by propaganda in the formation of public opinion, what has the academy worried about instead when it comes to the study of pernicious messages and their role in public life? Open dominant, deeply contested line of study has revolved around the concept of  ideology.  As defined by Raymond Williams in his wonderful  Keywords , ideology refers to an interlocking set of ideas, beliefs, concepts, or philosophical principles that are naturalized, taken for granted, or regarded as self-evident by various segments of society. Three controversial and interrelated principles then follow. First, ideology—particularly in its Marxist version—carries with it the implication that these ideas are somehow deceptive or disassociated from what actually exists. “Ideology is then abstract and false thought, in a sense directly related to the original conservative use but with the alternative—knowledge of real material conditions and relationships—differently stated” (Williams, 1976). Second, in all versions of Marxism, ideology is related to economic conditions in some fashion, with material reality, the economics of a situation, usually dominant and helping give birth to ideological precepts. In common Marxist terminology, this is usually described as the relationship between the base (economics and material conditions) and the superstructure (the realm of concepts, culture, and ideas). Third and finally, it is possible that different segments of society will have  different  ideologies, differences that are based in part on their position within the class structure of that society. 

Western Marxism in general (Anderson, 1976) and Antonio Gramsci in particular helped take these concepts and put them on the agenda of media and communications scholars by attaching more importance to “the superstructure” (and within it, media messages and cultural industries) than was the case in earlier Marxist thought. Journalism and “the media” thus play a major role in creating and maintaining ideology and thus perpetuating the deception that underlies ideological operations. In the study of the relationship between the media and ideology, “pernicious messages” obviously mean something different than they do in research on propaganda—a more structural, subtle, reinforcing, invisible, and materially dependent set of messages than is usually the case in propaganda analysis.  Perhaps most importantly, little research on media and communication understands ideology in terms of “discrete falsehoods and erroneous belief,” preferring to focus on processes of deep structural  misrecognition  that serves dominant economic interests (Corner, 2001, p. 526). This obviously marks a difference in emphasis as compared to most propaganda research. 

Much like in the study of propaganda, real-world developments have also had an impact on the academic analysis of media ideology. The collapse of communism in the 1980s and 1990s and the rise of neoliberal governance obviously has played a major role in these changes. Although only one amongst a great many debates about the status of ideology in a post-Marxist communications context, the exchange between Corner (2001, 2016) and Downey (2008; Downey et al., 2014) is useful for understanding how scholars have dealt with the relationship between large macro-economic and geopolitical changes in the world and fashions of research within the academy. Regardless of whether concepts of ideology are likely to return to fashion, any analysis of misinformation that is consonant with this tradition must keep in mind the relationship between class and culture, the outstanding and open question of “false consciousness,” and the key scholarly insight that ideological analysis is less concerned with false messages than it is with questions of structural misrecognition and the implications this might have for the maintenance of hegemony.

Postmodern conspiracy

Theorizing pernicious media content as a “conspiracy” theory is less common than either of the two perspectives discussed above. Certainly, conspiratorial media as an explanatory factor for political pathology has something of a post-Marxist (and indeed, postmodern) aura. Nevertheless, there was a period in the 1990s and early 2000s when some of the most interesting notions of conspiracy theories were analyzed in academic work, and it seems hard to deny that much of this literature would be relevant to the current emergence of the “QAnon” cult, the misinformation that is said to drive it, and other even more exotic notions of elites conspiring against the public. 

Frederic Jameson has penned remarks on conspiracy theory that represent the starting point for much current writing on the conspiratorial mindset, although an earlier and interrelated vein of scholarship can be found in the work of American writers such as Hofstadter (1964) and Rogin (1986). “Conspiracy is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age,” Jameson writes, “it is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system” (Jameson, 1991). If “postmodernism,” in Jameson’s terms, is marked by a skepticism toward metanarratives, then conspiracy theory is the only narrative system available to explain the various deformations of the capitalist system. As Horn and Rabinach put it:

“The broad interest taken by cultural studies in popular conspiracy theories mostly adopted Jameson’s view and regards them as the wrong answers to the right questions. Showing the symptoms of disorientation and loss of social transparency, conspiracy theorists are seen as the disenfranchised “poor in spirit,” who, for lack of a real understanding of the world they live in, come up with paranoid systems of world explanation.” (Horn & Rabinach, 2008)

Other thinkers, many of them operating from a perch within media studies and communications departments, have tried to take conspiracy theories more seriously (Bratich, 2008; Fenster, 2008; Pratt, 2003; Melley, 2008). The key question for all of these thinkers lies within the debate discussed in the previous section, the degree to which “real material interests” lie behind systems of ideological mystification and whether audiences themselves bear any responsibility for their own predicament. In general, writers sympathetic to Jameson have tended to maintain a Marxist perspective in which conspiracy represents a pastiche of hegemonic overthrow, thus rendering it just another form of ideological false consciousness. Theorists less taken with Marxist categories see conspiracy as an entirely rational (though incorrect) response to conditions of late modernity or even as potentially liberatory. Writers emphasizing that pernicious media content tends to fuel a conspiratorial mindset often emphasize the mediated aspects of information rather than the economics that lie behind these mediations. Both ideological analysis and academic writings on conspiracy theory argue that there is a gap between “what seems to be going on” and “what is actually going on,” and that this gap is maintained and widened by pernicious media messages. Research on ideology tends to see the purpose of pernicious media content as having an ultimately material source that is rooted in “real interests,” while research on conspiracies plays down these class aspects and questions whether any real interests exist that go beyond the exercise of political power.

The needs of informationally ill communities

The current thinking in misinformation studies owes something to all these approaches. But it owes an even more profound debt to two perspectives on information and journalism that emerged in the early 2000s, both of which are indebted to an “ecosystemic” perspective on information flows. One perspective sees information organizations and their audiences as approximating a natural ecosystem, in which different media providers contribute equally to the health of an information environment, which then leads to healthy citizens. The second perspective analyzes the flows of messages as they travel across an information environment, with messages becoming reshaped and distorted as they travel across an information network. 

Both of these perspectives owe a debt to the notion of the “informational citizen” that was popular around the turn of the century and that is best represented by the 2009 Knight Foundation report  The Information Needs of Communities  (Knight Foundation, 2009). This report pioneered the idea that communities were informational communities whose political health depended in large part on the quality of information these communities ingested. Additional reports by The Knight Foundation, the Pew Foundation, and this author (Anderson, 2010) looked at how messages circulated across these communities, and how their transformation impacted community health. 

It is a short step from these ecosystemic notions to a view of misinformation that sees it as a pollutant or even a virus (Anderson, 2020), one whose presence in a community turns it toward sickness or even political derangement. My argument here is that the current misinformation perspective owes less to its predecessors (with one key exception that I will discuss below) and more to concepts of information that were common at the turn of the century. The major difference between the concept of misinformation and earlier notions of informationally healthy citizens lies in the fact that the normative standard by which health is understood within information studies is crypto-normative. Where writings about journalism and ecosystemic health were openly liberal in nature and embraced notions of a rational, autonomous citizenry who just needed the right inputs in order to produce the right outputs, misinformation studies has a tendency to embrace liberal behavioralism without embracing a liberal political theory. What the political theory of misinformation studies is, in the end, deeply unclear.

I wrote earlier that misinformation studies owed more to notions of journalism from the turn of the century than it did to earlier traditions of theorizing. There is one exception to this, however. Misinformation studies, like propaganda analysis, is a radically de-structured notion of what information does. Buried within analysis of pernicious information there is

“A powerful cultural contradiction—the need to understand and explain social influence versus a rigid intolerance of the sociological and Marxist perspectives that could provide the theoretical basis for such an understanding. Brainwashing, after all, is ultimately a theory of ideology in the crude Marxian sense of “false consciousness.” Yet the concept of brainwashing was the brainchild of thinkers profoundly hostile to Marxism not only to its economic assumptions but also to its emphasis on structural, rather than individual, causality.” (Melley, 2008, p. 149)

For misinformation studies to grow in such a way that allows it to take its place among important academic theories of media and communication, several things must be done. The field needs to be more conscious of its own history, particularly its historical conceptual predecessors. It needs to more deeply interrogate its  informational-agentic  concept of what pernicious media content does, and perhaps find room in its arsenal for Marxist notions of hegemony or poststructuralist concepts of conspiracy. Finally, it needs to more openly advance its normative agenda, and indeed, take a normative position on what a good information environment would look like from the point of view of political theory. If this environment is a liberal one, so be it. But this position needs to be stated clearly.

Of course, misinformation studies need not worry about its academic bona fides at all. As the opening pages of this Commentary have shown, propaganda research was only briefly taken seriously as an important academic field. This did not stop it from being funded by the U.S. government to the tune of 1.5 billion dollars a year. While it is unlikely that media research will ever see that kind of investment again, at least by an American government, let’s not forget that geopolitical Great Power conflict has not disappeared in the four years that Donald Trump was the American president. Powerful state forces in Western society will have their own needs, and their own demands, for misinformation research. It is up to the scholarly community to decide how they will react to these temptations. 

• Mainstream Media
• / Propaganda

Cite this Essay

Anderson, C. W. (2021). Propaganda, misinformation, and histories of media techniques. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-64

Bibliography

Anderson, C. W. (2010). Journalistic networks and the diffusion of local news: The brief, happy news life of the Francisville Four. Political Communication , 27 (3), 289–309. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2010.496710

Anderson, C. W. (2020, August 10). Fake news is not a virus: On platforms and their effects. Communication Theory , 31 (1), 42–61. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaa008

Anderson, P. (1976). Considerations on Western Marxism . Verso.

Bratich, J. Z. (2008). Conspiracy panics: Political rationality and popular culture. State University of New York Press.

Corner, J. (2001). ‘Ideology’: A note on conceptual salvage. Media, Culture & Society , 23 (4), 525–533. https://doi.org/10.1177/016344301023004006

Corner, J. (2016). ‘Ideology’ and media research. Media, Culture & Society , 38 (2), 265 – 273. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443715610923

Downey, J. (2008). Recognition and renewal of ideology critique. In D. Hesmondhaigh & J. Toynbee (Eds.), The media and social theory (pp. 59–74). Routledge.

Downey, J., Titley, G., & Toynbee, J. (2014). Ideology critique: The challenge for media studies. Media, Culture & Society , 36 (6), 878–887. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443714536113

Fenster (2008). Conspiracy theories: Secrecy and power in American culture (Rev. ed.). University of Minnesota Press.

Herman, E., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. Pantheon Books. 

Hofstadter, R. (1964, November). The paranoid style in American politics. Harper’s Magazine.

Horn, E., & Rabinach, A. (2008). Introduction. In E. Horn (Ed.), Dark powers: Conspiracies and conspiracy theory in history and literature (pp. 1–8), New German Critique , 35 (1). https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-2007-015

Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism . Duke University Press.

The Knight Foundation. (2009). Informing communities: Sustaining democracy in the digital age. https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Knight_Commission_Report_-_Informing_Communities.pdf

Melley, T. (2008). Brainwashed! Conspiracy theory and ideology in postwar United States. New German Critique , 35 (1), 145–164. https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-2007-023

Nietzel, B. (2016). Propaganda, psychological warfare and communication research in the USA and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. History of the Human Sciences , 29 (4 – 5), 59–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695116667881

Pratt, R. (2003). Theorizing conspiracy. Theory and Society , 32 , 255–271. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023996501425

Rogin, M. P. (1986). The countersubversive tradition in American politics.  Berkeley Journal of Sociology,   31 , 1 –33. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41035372

Seldes, G., & Seldes, H. (1943). Facts and fascism. In Fact.

Simpson, C. (1994). Science of coercion: Communication research and psychological warfare, 1945–1960. Oxford University Press.

Williams, R. (1976).  Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society . Oxford University Press.

Zollmann, F. (2019). Bringing propaganda back into news media studies. Critical Sociology , 45 (3), 329–345. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920517731134

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.

103 Propaganda Essay Topics & Examples

Looking for good propaganda topics to write about? This field is truly exciting and worth exploring!

🏆 Best Propaganda Topic Ideas

🔊 excellent propaganda essay examples, 👍 good propaganda essay topics, ❓ questions about propaganda.

In your propaganda essay, you might want to focus on the historical or ethical aspects of the issue. Another interesting option would be to focus on a particular case and discuss the effectiveness of propaganda. In this article, we’ve gathered a list of top propaganda topics to write about. They will suit for essays, research papers, speeches or other projects. We’ve also added some excellent propaganda essay examples to inspire you even more.

• World War II Propaganda Posters in America The imagery of the boot stepping on the American church is not just a threat to the religious ideals of the country but a threat to freedom itself as the church often doubled as the […]
• Persuasion and Propaganda: Differences and Similarities In contrast to propaganda, persuasion is characterized by private acceptance of the position advocated in the message. In contrast to persuasion, propaganda is based on mind control aimed to condemn the recipients of a particular […]
• Hitler’s Use of Propaganda and Fear-Mongering The establishment of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party led to the adoption of a properly coordinated propaganda campaign that would prepare the country for war.
• Propaganda During World War II The Second World War was a complicated time for both the general public and the authorities since while the former worried for their safety, family, and homeland, the latter needed to maintain the national spirit […]
• Propaganda Techniques in the Vitaminwater Advertisement Applying this technique implies that an advertisement uses strong, attractive words and phrases to show how good a product is in order to attract the audience’s attention.
• Propaganda Techniques in Advertising The end goal is to solidify the brand in the subconscious mind of the buyers, in order for it to be able to compete with other brands.
• French Revolution: Role of Propaganda and Music The history of propaganda is based on three interweaving fundamentals: first, the mounting need, with the growth of civilization and the rise of nation-state, to win the battle for people’s minds; second, the increasing sophistication […]
• Stereotypes and Propaganda in Society Analysis The unfortunate reality is that the propaganda onslaught is continuous and the gullibility of the audience is also too often and thus the thinking of the majority of the audience is corrupted on heavy scales.
• Propaganda in “Animal Farm” by George Orwell His greatest objective is to carry out the spreading of the revolution and to bring in the improvement of the general welfare of all the animals on the farm.
• Political Propaganda in The Aeneid by Virgil As the paper reveals, The Aeneid is a political epic that was written with a political agenda to justify the founding of the nation of Rome.
• Rhetoric and Propaganda: How Far Is Rhetoric From Propaganda? In order to understand the essence of the two terms, it is important to consider the available definitions and meanings assigned to rhetoric and propaganda in the modern world.
• World War II Propaganda and Its Effects The purpose of this paper is to examine the confrontation between the German and the Soviet propaganda machines during the period of the Second Patriotic War, outline the goals and purposes of each, and identify […]
• Anti-War Movement DADA Vs. Propaganda Posters of WWI In relation to the causes of the WWI, these can considered as pertinent specifically on the basis that the reasons can be related to the type of society that is present during the said era.
• Propaganda in the Democratic Society The article focuses on the effects of propaganda on the democracy. In the article, he focuses on his experiences in the media industry with respect to the past and the present news.
• The World War II Propaganda Techniques All the parties to the war, including Germany, the Soviet Union, and Britain, invested many resources in propaganda, but the present essay will focus on the United States’ effort. Furthermore, propaganda messages were created to […]
• The History of Propaganda: From the Ancient Times to Nowadays The history of propaganda shows that some means of encouraging the troops, or discouraging the enemy were undertaken in the ancient times, and the times have preserved and brought up the names of the greatest […]
• The Use of Propaganda in Political Campaigns The issue of propaganda is of current importance because we hear such words we can face propaganda in every sphere of human life: political campaigns, propaganda of healthy way of life, propaganda in the sphere […]
• Propaganda, Persuasion and Public Relations For example in the case of the Australia’s cancellation of the Fuel Watch program Senator Xenaphon utilized propaganda stating that Fuel Watch was not an effective means of helping consumers stating the need to tackle […]
• How to Control What People Do: “Propaganda” by Edward Bernays In the book, Bernays explains how he employed propaganda to manipulate the public when he was the head of the United States Department of public information during world war I.
• Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Its Propaganda The Middle East also has a serious economic impact on the rest of the world because of the rich oil deposits, especially in the countries bordering the Persian Gulf.
• Authoritarian Propaganda in Education and Media The question that people often ask themselves is, ‘how do authoritarian regimes get away with violence, torture, and oppression?’ Most of the citizens in countries led by authoritarians often seem to be in agreement with […]
• “The Motherland Calls”: Art as Political Propaganda The statue is meant to commemorate the Soviet victory in the Second World War, represent the soviet might, and serve as a message to all enemies of the USSR.
• Contribution of Media Text to World Wars’ Propaganda The key stakeholders in the industry prioritized profit maximization, hence amplifying the benefits of winning the war while minimally addressing the repercussions of the violence to the international community.
• Freedom of Speech and Propaganda in School Setting One of the practical solutions to the problem is the development and implementation of a comprehensive policy for balanced free speech in the classroom.
• The Role of Propaganda During World War II The poster encourages men to enroll in the army to protect the peaceful lives of women and children. By manipulating emotions and feelings, propaganda influenced people to enroll in the army or work harder.
• Nazi Propaganda and Triumph of the Will Based on this, the filming of the Triumph of the Will took place with the help of the vision of the world and the situation by the directors, omitting a number of significant events or […]
• Basic Propaganda Techniques The majority of the article is dedicated to Logos, however, presenting logical arguments and examples. When examples of negativity can be largely attributed only to one side, the folly occurs as follows: Subject A is […]
• Jim Crow Era Signage and Advertisements: Tools for Reinforcement a Racist Propaganda The quality of the services offered to “colored” people, It comes as no surprise, that all public facilities and spaces were segregated, particularly in the Southern states.
• The Use of Radio in German Propaganda During the World War II One of the techniques used by the Nazis to persuade German people and shape their worldview was the use of such media as radio.
• War on Terror: Propaganda and Freedom of the Press in the US There was the launching of the “Center for Media and Democracy”, CMD, in the year 1993 in order to create what was the only public interest at that period. There was expansive use of propaganda […]
• Medieval and Renaissance Art Religious Style and Propaganda The main task of these artworks was to inspire and awe the people, to show the greatness and almightiness of God.
• Is Propaganda a Technique or a Phenomenon? The main goal of this paper is to analyze the nature of propaganda to answer the question of whether it is a phenomenon or a technique.
• World War I: Medias of Propaganda in the U.S. Posters of World War 1 presented a different style of propaganda because of the war time effort of U S government.
• Commercial Advertisements as a Form of Propaganda System This is due to the fact that the objective of advertisement is to promote a product or service resulting in a financial benefit to the firm.
• Commercial Advertising as a Propaganda System The propaganda system is a commonly used tool of winning the attention of the audience and is mostly used in political circles although it has of late gained popularity in the business environment.
• Anti-Japanese Propaganda During World War II The content of propaganda was much the same as that of broadcast propaganda: emphasis on the Allies’ growing war potential, ridicule of the more preposterous assertions of the National Socialists, evidence of self-contradictions in the […]
• Propaganda in Art During the Second World War In the background of the Great Depression, and the Second World War this poster was the embodiment of the unification of generations, which takes place at the feast table.”The Four Freedoms” speech, proclaimed by Roosevelt […]
• Persuasion and Propaganda in Modern Society Persuasion is based on discourse and dialogue; propaganda is intended to be one-sided” Some researchers, such as Cain, look at any piece of media communication according to the ten points identified by Jowett and O’Donnell […]
• Nazi’s Propaganda in the XX Century At first, Nazis used propaganda technologies to draw attention of other political organizations of the right wing, then, after the departure of imprisonment by Hitler, the party becomes better organized and, finally, propaganda is used […]
• Post-World War II Propaganda Art According to Arendt, the “who” is revealed in the narratives people tell of themselves and others. We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in […]
• The Power of Propaganda He is of the opinion that lies comprise the lion’s share of propaganda and describes it as a very powerful tool utilized in the arena of politics.
• Bolshevik Propaganda in the Russian Revolution Communists hoped to achieve, and that was why they had more and more concentrated their propaganda efforts on the boys and girls and the young men and women.
• Propaganda Theory Analysis Communication Theory Propaganda Theory Meaning The propaganda theory explains how social, political, and economic attitudes are manufactured to manipulate the populace, for the sake of the welfare of entities with power and money. Invention Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky introduced the theory in their book, Manufacturing Consent – The Political Economy of the Mass […]
• Albert Speer’s Architectural Scale as a Tool of Nazi Propaganda In the center of attention of Hitler, there was the restructuring of Berlin by the architect Albert Speer. Such buildings as the Volkshalle and the Cathedral of Light were the most expressive projects that illustrated […]
• Propaganda and Political Framing The video chosen for the overview in this paper is called “Euromaidan/Kijow 2014”, it was posted on YouTube by a user under the nickname MrMitos1 in the end of February this year, which was the […]
• Propaganda of Social Movements and Non-State Actors Taking a closer and more attentive look at the FARC video, it is easy to notice that the cartoon characters are of Latin origin, the video is designed to attract the people of Colombia and […]
• Terrorism as Spectacle: Extremist Propaganda The objective of terrorist propaganda is to influence the attitude of a specified mass audience. Terrorist propaganda in the video links is intended to publicize acts of brutality committed by the militants.
• Advertising: Rhetoric or Propaganda? The shorter video mainly features the executive director of the “Morningside Recovery” company, who might be described as an attractive person, which creates additional appeal in the viewers of the video; the director briefly outlines […]
• Propaganda: “Total” and “Time” Concepts The fact that the most outrageous instances of propaganda are never forgotten and stay in history brings us to the next aspect of the investigated phenomenon and technique, which is the “Time”.
• The Cyberspace War: Propaganda and Trolling To justify the theory that will be used in the study, it is necessary to state that the Russian government has been using the workforce of its employees to change people’s opinions to the ones […]
• American Government: Propaganda and Persuasion He successfully achieved his goal of sending a man to the Moon and managed to beat the Soviet Union mostly due to his ability to capture people’s imagination.
• Holocaust, Antisemitism, and Propaganda That is why, nowadays great attention is given to issues which led to the death of millions of people. Being a part of the ideology of Nazism, it led to the elimination of a great […]
• Islamic State’s Online Propaganda to Men and Women The third hypothesis is that the ISIS extensively uses misrepresentation as a tool of online communication, i.e.the way the role and position of women in the ISIS presented in the terrorists’ online communication are significantly […]
• Propaganda as a Social Phenomenon Edgar Henderson, also comprehensively in propaganda scholarship, argues that propaganda is basically a social phenomenon owing to its objectivity and capacity to appeal to the psychological or sociopsychological dispositions of individuals.
• Propaganda: Terrorist, Government, State, Non-State Extremists pass their terrorist propaganda to the youth through the power of the media and the internet. Ideally, propaganda that is produced by the state aims at influencing the opinions and attitudes of its people […]
• Terrorist and Government Propaganda in Media The aim of terrorists, especially those concerned with religious extremism, is to attract the attention of the state and other members of the public.
• Propaganda and Marketing Relationships This aspect was meant to prevent the wrong societal perceptions that Bernays was promoting Venida products in the market, but showing the public the importance of the hairnets.
• Propaganda of Adolf Hitler and Jim Jones This is a scenario that has occurred with the Nazi, under the command of Adolf Hitler, and the story of Jim Jones, and the people who followed him in a quest to build an ideal […]
• Propaganda Techniques in Movies: Light, Camera, Action Despite using rather simplistic propaganda techniques and devices, such as Beautiful People and Flag-Waving, the movie manages to get the key idea of the major flaws at the very core of the current healthcare system […]
• Propaganda Forms and Techniques They both target the anti-government group that is most likely to criticize and question the actions of the government. The policies of the government have been hijacked and are now in favor of the ruling […]
• Propaganda Model and Media Power The media is expected to expose any practices of the government and corporate bodies that may cause any harm to the public in one way or the other.
• Propaganda Movement in Mass Media Through the study of Gimenez et al, it was seen that the correlation between the propaganda model and the power of the media can be summarized on the impact of irrational exuberance as a means […]
• Influence of Propaganda Politics The organizers of the event were well conversant with the impact of the flag to the message; it created credibility and believability among the members of the public.
• The Marlboro Ads as a Propaganda Advertising As such, the target of information presented is to alter the attitudes of consumers towards the interests of the advert sponsors.
• Propaganda as Hezbollah’s Auxiliary Strategy These strategies include the construction of a propaganda theme park, the establishment of a Hezbollah television station, the development of anti-Israeli video games, and the production of varied merchandise that promote Hezbollah’s ideas and values.
• Why We Fight: American Wartime Propaganda The reason for this is simple contrary to what it is being suggested in the film, the overwhelming majority of German Nazis, as well as ordinary German citizens who never ceased supporting Nazis right to […]
• Propaganda in Pro-slavery Arguments and Douglass’s Narrative Propaganda refers to the form of communication that is meant to influence the feelings and attitudes of individual to believe or support a certain viewpoint.
• Propaganda Model: Herman and Noam Chomsky In Chomsky’s opinion, the conclusion that the tyranny of the majority can threaten the rights of persons, including the rights for freedom of speech and conscience, was the result of confusion caused by the vague […]
• Al Jazeera TV: A Propaganda Platform Al Jazeera is the largest media outlet in the Middle East reporting events mostly to the Arab world. The media outlet has equated revolutions in Egypt and Libya with the ejection of totalitarianism in the […]
• History of Hitler’s Nazi Propaganda According to Hitler, the German’s defeat in the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, German’s post war inflation, and the economic crisis of the year 1929 were accredited to International Jewry. Over time, the masses […]
• Media Propaganda: Poster Advertisement Further, at the lower right corner, the poster has a picture of the spray under consideration and the name of the spray: “New Axe Essence”.
• Propaganda and Mass Media: Obstacles and Best Conditions for Propagandist The first obstacle is to comprehensively understand the nature of the target audience that the propagandist wants to modify through the use of propaganda.
• Propaganda in the “Triumph of the Will” This is propaganda because the development of Germany was not based on the efforts of the labor force alone, but also on all German citizens and the world at large. He is often heard saying […]
• What American Leader Relies on Propaganda and Appeals to Fear?
• How Did Hitler Consolidate His Power and Continue to Gain Support Using Propaganda?
• How Is Propaganda Used?
• How Effective Were Indoctrination and Propaganda?
• Did a Campaign of Propaganda and Disinformation Initiate the War in Iraq?
• How Did the Nazi Regime Use Propaganda as a Form of Political Control?
• What Makes a Good Propaganda?
• How Media and Propaganda Are Related?
• How Did the Nazi Party Use Propaganda?
• How Were Cartoons and Propaganda Used Against Jews and Nazis During World War II?
• How Did Propaganda Help the Nazis Control?
• What Role Did Printed Propaganda Play in the Outbreak and Continuation of Conflict During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms?
• How the Nazi Germans Used the Media to Spread Propaganda During Hitler’s Time?
• How Does Napoleon Use Persuasive Language and Propaganda to Seize and Maintain Power?
• Was Propaganda the Main Reason for the Lack of Opposition to the Nazis?
• How Have Images and Designs Been Used as Social Protest and Propaganda?
• How Effective Was Propaganda in Affecting the Way People Acted and Thought?
• Why Did the British Government Make Use of Propaganda During World War I?
• How Successful Was Propaganda in Indoctrinating Nazi Ideals?
• How Did Radio and Movies Change People’s Ideas, and How Were They Used for Spreading Propaganda?
• What Are Propaganda Historical Origins?
• What Is Propaganda in Psychology?
• How Propaganda Helped the Nazi Government to Control Germany?
• How Far Did Ancient Coinage Serve as a Medium for Political Propaganda?
• What Is Bandwagon in Propaganda?
• Why the Society Has to Co-exist With Propaganda?
• How Vital Was Propaganda to Nazi Control Over Germany in 1934-1939?
• How Important Was the Governments Use of Propaganda in Bringing the Strike to an Early End?
• How and Why Did the Nazis Use Propaganda to Further Their Aims 1929-1933?
• How Does Propaganda Work?
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, February 29). 103 Propaganda Essay Topics & Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/propaganda-essay-topics/

"103 Propaganda Essay Topics & Examples." IvyPanda , 29 Feb. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/topic/propaganda-essay-topics/.

IvyPanda . (2024) '103 Propaganda Essay Topics & Examples'. 29 February.

IvyPanda . 2024. "103 Propaganda Essay Topics & Examples." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/propaganda-essay-topics/.

1. IvyPanda . "103 Propaganda Essay Topics & Examples." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/propaganda-essay-topics/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "103 Propaganda Essay Topics & Examples." February 29, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/propaganda-essay-topics/.

• Mass Communication Essay Topics
• Fake News Research Ideas
• Television Ideas
• Broadcasting Paper Topics
• Telecommunications Questions
• Censorship Essay Ideas
• Media Bias Questions
• Elections Essay Titles
• Public Relations Titles
• Public Safety Research Ideas
• Gun Control Titles
• Quality Control Research Topics
• Birth control Questions
• Dictatorship Topics
• Totalitarianism Questions

Have a language expert improve your writing

Run a free plagiarism check in 10 minutes, generate accurate citations for free.

• Knowledge Base
• How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples

How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples

Published on January 11, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on August 15, 2023 by Eoghan Ryan.

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . It usually comes near the end of your introduction .

Your thesis will look a bit different depending on the type of essay you’re writing. But the thesis statement should always clearly state the main idea you want to get across. Everything else in your essay should relate back to this idea.

You can write your thesis statement by following four simple steps:

• Start with a question
• Write your initial answer
• Develop your answer
• Refine your thesis statement

Instantly correct all language mistakes in your text

Upload your document to correct all your mistakes in minutes

Table of contents

What is a thesis statement, placement of the thesis statement, step 1: start with a question, step 2: write your initial answer, step 3: develop your answer, step 4: refine your thesis statement, types of thesis statements, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about thesis statements.

A thesis statement summarizes the central points of your essay. It is a signpost telling the reader what the essay will argue and why.

The best thesis statements are:

• Concise: A good thesis statement is short and sweet—don’t use more words than necessary. State your point clearly and directly in one or two sentences.
• Contentious: Your thesis shouldn’t be a simple statement of fact that everyone already knows. A good thesis statement is a claim that requires further evidence or analysis to back it up.
• Coherent: Everything mentioned in your thesis statement must be supported and explained in the rest of your paper.

Here's why students love Scribbr's proofreading services

Discover proofreading & editing

The thesis statement generally appears at the end of your essay introduction or research paper introduction .

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts and among young people more generally is hotly debated. For many who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education: the internet facilitates easier access to information, exposure to different perspectives, and a flexible learning environment for both students and teachers.

You should come up with an initial thesis, sometimes called a working thesis , early in the writing process . As soon as you’ve decided on your essay topic , you need to work out what you want to say about it—a clear thesis will give your essay direction and structure.

You might already have a question in your assignment, but if not, try to come up with your own. What would you like to find out or decide about your topic?

For example, you might ask:

After some initial research, you can formulate a tentative answer to this question. At this stage it can be simple, and it should guide the research process and writing process .

Now you need to consider why this is your answer and how you will convince your reader to agree with you. As you read more about your topic and begin writing, your answer should get more detailed.

In your essay about the internet and education, the thesis states your position and sketches out the key arguments you’ll use to support it.

The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education because it facilitates easier access to information.

In your essay about braille, the thesis statement summarizes the key historical development that you’ll explain.

The invention of braille in the 19th century transformed the lives of blind people, allowing them to participate more actively in public life.

A strong thesis statement should tell the reader:

• Why you hold this position
• What they’ll learn from your essay
• The key points of your argument or narrative

The final thesis statement doesn’t just state your position, but summarizes your overall argument or the entire topic you’re going to explain. To strengthen a weak thesis statement, it can help to consider the broader context of your topic.

These examples are more specific and show that you’ll explore your topic in depth.

Your thesis statement should match the goals of your essay, which vary depending on the type of essay you’re writing:

• In an argumentative essay , your thesis statement should take a strong position. Your aim in the essay is to convince your reader of this thesis based on evidence and logical reasoning.
• In an expository essay , you’ll aim to explain the facts of a topic or process. Your thesis statement doesn’t have to include a strong opinion in this case, but it should clearly state the central point you want to make, and mention the key elements you’ll explain.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

College essays

• Choosing Essay Topic
• Write a College Essay
• Write a Diversity Essay
• College Essay Format & Structure
• Comparing and Contrasting in an Essay

 (AI) Tools

• Grammar Checker
• Paraphrasing Tool
• Text Summarizer
• AI Detector
• Plagiarism Checker
• Citation Generator

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:

• It gives your writing direction and focus.
• It gives the reader a concise summary of your main point.

Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.

Follow these four steps to come up with a thesis statement :

• Ask a question about your topic .
• Write your initial answer.
• Develop your answer by including reasons.
• Refine your answer, adding more detail and nuance.

The thesis statement should be placed at the end of your essay introduction .

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

McCombes, S. (2023, August 15). How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved April 9, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/thesis-statement/

Is this article helpful?

Shona McCombes

Other students also liked, how to write an essay introduction | 4 steps & examples, how to write topic sentences | 4 steps, examples & purpose, academic paragraph structure | step-by-step guide & examples, what is your plagiarism score.

• Search Menu
• Advance articles
• Browse content in Biological, Health, and Medical Sciences
• Administration Of Health Services, Education, and Research
• Agricultural Sciences
• Allied Health Professions
• Anesthesiology
• Anthropology
• Anthropology (Biological, Health, and Medical Sciences)
• Applied Biological Sciences
• Biochemistry
• Biophysics and Computational Biology (Biological, Health, and Medical Sciences)
• Biostatistics
• Cell Biology
• Dermatology
• Developmental Biology
• Environmental Sciences (Biological, Health, and Medical Sciences)
• Immunology and Inflammation
• Internal Medicine
• Medical Microbiology
• Medical Sciences
• Microbiology
• Neuroscience
• Obstetrics and Gynecology
• Ophthalmology
• Pharmacology
• Physical Medicine
• Plant Biology
• Population Biology
• Psychological and Cognitive Sciences (Biological, Health, and Medical Sciences)
• Public Health and Epidemiology
• Radiation Oncology
• Rehabilitation
• Sustainability Science (Biological, Health, and Medical Sciences)
• Systems Biology
• Browse content in Physical Sciences and Engineering
• Aerospace Engineering
• Applied Mathematics
• Applied Physical Sciences
• Bioengineering
• Biophysics and Computational Biology (Physical Sciences and Engineering)
• Chemical Engineering
• Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Computer Sciences
• Computer Science and Engineering
• Earth Resources Engineering
• Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
• Electric Power and Energy Systems Engineering
• Electronics, Communications and Information Systems Engineering
• Engineering
• Environmental Sciences (Physical Sciences and Engineering)
• Materials Engineering
• Mathematics
• Mechanical Engineering
• Sustainability Science (Physical Sciences and Engineering)
• Browse content in Social and Political Sciences
• Anthropology (Social and Political Sciences)
• Economic Sciences
• Environmental Sciences (Social and Political Sciences)
• Political Sciences
• Psychological and Cognitive Sciences (Social and Political Sciences)
• Social Sciences
• Sustainability Science (Social and Political Sciences)
• Author guidelines
• Submission site
• Open access policy
• Self-archiving policy
• Why submit to PNAS Nexus
• The PNAS portfolio
• For reviewers
• About PNAS Nexus
• About National Academy of Sciences
• Editorial Board
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

Introduction, experimental design, acknowledgments, supplementary material, author contributions, data availability.

• < Previous

How persuasive is AI-generated propaganda?

Competing Interest: The authors declare no competing interest.

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Josh A Goldstein, Jason Chao, Shelby Grossman, Alex Stamos, Michael Tomz, How persuasive is AI-generated propaganda?, PNAS Nexus , Volume 3, Issue 2, February 2024, pgae034, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae034

• Permissions Icon Permissions

Can large language models, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), generate persuasive propaganda? We conducted a preregistered survey experiment of US respondents to investigate the persuasiveness of news articles written by foreign propagandists compared to content generated by GPT-3 davinci (a large language model). We found that GPT-3 can create highly persuasive text as measured by participants’ agreement with propaganda theses. We further investigated whether a person fluent in English could improve propaganda persuasiveness. Editing the prompt fed to GPT-3 and/or curating GPT-3’s output made GPT-3 even more persuasive, and, under certain conditions, as persuasive as the original propaganda. Our findings suggest that propagandists could use AI to create convincing content with limited effort.

Online covert propaganda campaigns are frequent and ongoing. Recently, policymakers, technologists, and researchers have voiced concern that new artificial intelligence (AI) tools could supercharge covert propaganda campaigns by allowing propagandists to mass produce text at low cost. Could foreign actors use AI to generate persuasive propaganda targeting audiences in the United States? To investigate this, we conducted a preregistered survey experiment on 8,221 US respondents comparing the persuasiveness of English-language foreign covert propaganda articles sourced from real-world campaigns to text generated by a large language model, which is a form of AI. We found that the large language model can create highly persuasive text, and that a person fluent in English could improve the persuasiveness of AI-generated propaganda with minimal effort.

Academics, journalists, online platforms, and governments have demonstrated that online covert propaganda campaigns are frequent and ongoing ( 1 , 2 ). Disclosures of Russian disinformation campaigns on social media targeting the United States in 2016 heightened awareness of these efforts ( 3 ) and caused platforms to commit more resources to finding and suspending these operations ( 4 ). Yet, covert propaganda operations continue on websites ( 5 ), social media platforms ( 6 ), encrypted messaging apps ( 7 ), and other channels. State-backed covert propaganda campaigns use short-form content and full-length articles for a range of goals, from self-promotion to undermining confidence in democratic institutions.

Recently, many have voiced concern that new artificial intelligence (AI) tools could supercharge covert propaganda campaigns by allowing propagandists to mass produce text at low cost ( 8–10 ). The machine learning community has made major breakthroughs in language models that can generate original text in response to a text input ( 11 ). These models are quickly diffusing across society.

Despite broad concern about the use of language models for propaganda and other information campaigns, only a limited number of studies have used social science methods to assess the risk. Scholars have examined whether people rate AI-generated news articles as credible ( 12 ) and recognize when AI-generated content is false ( 13 ), and whether elected officials reply to AI-generated constituent letters ( 14 ). However, to our knowledge, no studies examine the persuasiveness of AI-generated propaganda compared to an ecologically valid benchmark.

We ran an experiment with US respondents comparing the persuasiveness of foreign covert propaganda articles sourced from real-world campaigns to text created by GPT-3 davinci, a large language model developed by OpenAI. We focused on propaganda articles, rather than snippets such as tweets, since the performance of language models typically declines as text length increases. We therefore create a relatively “hard case” for the technology. Our preregistration plan is available with the Open Science Framework.

Article selection and construction

We began by identifying six articles (ranging from 151 to 308 words long) that investigative journalists or researchers uncovered as part of covert, likely state-aligned propaganda campaigns originating from either Iran or Russia (see SI Appendix 1.A for details on article selection). We then used GPT-3 to generate articles on the same six topics. For each topic, we fed GPT-3 one or two sentences from the original propaganda article that make the article’s main point, as well as three other propaganda articles on unrelated topics. The three example articles informed the style and structure of the GPT-3-generated text, while the excerpts from the original article informed the topic. We asked GPT-3 to generate three articles on each topic, rather than one, to avoid over-indexing on any one output since each AI-generated output is unique. We discarded generations that were <686 characters or >1,936 characters. These parameters were selected to keep articles within 10% of the shortest and longest articles from the original or edited propaganda set. No other criteria were used to discard GPT-3 output. (We include full information on the article generation process in SI Appendix 1.B .)

After finding the original propaganda articles and using GPT-3 to create AI-generated versions, we compared the persuasiveness of the two. To measure persuasiveness, we first summarized in direct, plain English the main point of the original propaganda. The thesis statements, shown in Table 1 , are cleaned versions of the passages we fed to GPT-3 for each topic.

Researcher-written thesis statements for the six articles.

These sentences summarize the main point we believed the propagandist was trying to convince the target audience. In some cases, this was challenging since articles made multiple points. Several of these statements are either false or debatable.

Survey deployment

In December 2021, we interviewed US adults using Lucid, a survey company that uses quota sampling to achieve geographic and demographic representativeness. Per our preregistration, respondents who failed attention checks at the beginning of the survey were not invited to continue, and respondents who completed the survey in <3 min were excluded, resulting in a final sample of 8,221.

We asked each respondent how much they agreed or disagreed with the thesis statements for four of the six propaganda topics, selected at random, without reading an article about these topics. This serves as our control data. We then presented each respondent with articles on the remaining two topics and measured agreement with the thesis statements for those topics. Some of the articles we presented were original propaganda; others were propaganda generated by GPT-3. (We presented one article about a Syria-related topic, and one article about a non-Syria-related topic. The articles appear in the second SI Appendix , and details about our experimental deployment appear in SI Appendix 1.C .)

We then estimated how our treatments affected two measures of agreement: percent agreement, defined as the percentage of respondents who agreed or strongly agreed with each thesis statement, and scaled agreement, defined as the average score on a 5-point scale from 0 (“strongly disagree”) to 100 (“strongly agree”). Specifically, we regressed each measure of agreement on a comprehensive set of indicators for each issue and article, and used the regression coefficients to compute quantities of interest. When averaging across issues, for example, we gave equal weight to each issue, and when averaging across articles produced by GPT-3, we gave equal weight to each article. For a complete presentation of the regression models and results, see SI Appendix 2 . Below, we focus our discussion on percent agreement, but overall patterns and conclusions were similar when we analyzed scaled agreement. a

This study was approved by Stanford University’s Institutional Review Board which focused on risks to survey respondents, and also vetted by a cross-professional AI-specific Ethics Review Board that considered risks to society. All participants provided informed consent. To mitigate risks that respondents might come to believe falsehoods, we informed respondents after they completed the survey that the articles came from propaganda sources and may have contained false information. Regarding risks to society, propagandists are likely already well aware of the capabilities of large language models; historically, propagandists have been quick both to adopt new technologies and incorporate local language speakers into their work. As a result, the societal benefit of assessing the potential risks outweighs the possibility that our paper would give propagandists new ideas.

Persuasiveness of GPT-3-generated propaganda

To establish a benchmark against which we can evaluate GPT-3, we first assess the effect of reading the original propaganda compared to not reading any propaganda about that topic (the control). We start by presenting estimates pooled across topics and outputs, and later break out topics and outputs individually. As shown in Fig. 1 , the original propaganda was highly persuasive. While only 24.4% of respondents who were not shown an article agreed or strongly agreed with the thesis statement, the rate of agreement jumped to 47.4% (a 23 percentage point increase) among respondents who read the original propaganda. Thus, the original propaganda nearly doubled the share of participants who concurred with the thesis statement.

Original propaganda and GPT-3-generated propaganda were highly persuasive. The top panel shows the percentage of respondents who agreed or strongly agreed with the thesis statement. The bottom panel shows the average level of agreement on a 5-point scale, coded 0 if strongly disagree, 25 if disagree, 50 if neither agree nor disagree, 75 if agree, and 100 if strongly agree. Estimates are pooled across topics and outputs. SEs clustered by respondent and 95% CIs are shown.

GPT-3-generated propaganda was also highly persuasive, and 43.5% of respondents who read a GPT-3-generated article agreed or strongly agreed with the thesis statement, compared to 24.4% in the control (a 19.1 percentage point increase). This suggests that propagandists could use GPT-3 to generate persuasive articles with minimal human effort, by using existing articles on unrelated topics to guide GPT-3 about the style and length of new articles. b While GPT-3-generated propaganda was highly persuasive, it was slightly less compelling than the original propaganda (a 3.9% point difference). Figures S7 and S8 show that the persuasive effects of the original propaganda and GPT-3 propaganda were fairly consistent across social groups. We did not find substantial heterogeneity in treatment effects when we split the sample by demographic variables, partisanship/ideology, news consumption, time spent on social media, and more. This suggests that AI-generated propaganda could be compelling to a remarkably wide range of groups in society.

In Fig. 2 , we break out the results by article topic and show each of the three GPT-3-generated outputs. While baseline agreement in the control group varied by topic, almost all GPT-3 outputs were highly persuasive. For most issues, each GPT-3-generated article was about as persuasive as the original propaganda. However, this was not always the case. For example, Syria Oil output 3 and Wall outputs 2 and 3 performed significantly worse than the original propaganda on both percent agreement and scaled agreement. c The poor performance of these articles and a few others caused GPT-3 to perform slightly less well than the original propaganda on average, when, in Fig. 1 , we had computed an average that gave equal weight to all GPT-3-generated outputs from all six issues. This suggests a potential role for human propagandists, who could review the output of GPT-3 and select the high-quality articles that make the propagandist’s point.

Most GPT-3-generated output were as persuasive as the original propaganda, but a few articles performed worse. Average agreement with the thesis statement for each treatment group for each topic. SEs clustered by respondent and 95% CIs are shown.

Human–machine teaming

In practice, propagandists might not use all of the output from a model in a propaganda campaign. Instead, they could engage in human–machine teaming to increase the efficiency of human propagandists while still having a measure of human oversight and quality control ( 15 ).

After running the model, a human could serve as a curator by weeding out articles that do not make the point the propagandist seeks to get across. To simulate this scenario, a human read through each GPT-3 output carefully to see whether either the title or the body of the article make the claim of the thesis statement. (For a description of this process, see SI Appendix 1.D .) Two of the GPT-3 propaganda articles (out of 18 total) did not advance the intended claim. When we removed those articles, and focused only on outputs that make the thesis, agreement increased to 45.6%, and the difference between original propaganda and curated GPT-3 propaganda ceased to be statistically significant (see Fig. 3 ). Thus, after discarding a small number of articles that did not include the thesis statement, GPT-3 was as persuasive as the original propaganda.

Human curation made GPT-3 as persuasive as the original propaganda. Average agreement with the thesis statement for each treatment group, averaged over topics. “All outputs (no curation)” includes all GPT-3 propaganda articles. “Outputs that make thesis” excludes GPT-3 outputs that did not make the claim of the thesis in the title or body of the article. “Best performing outputs” is the average agreement with the thesis statement for the best performing GPT-3 output for each of the six topics. SEs and 95% CIs are shown.

Another strategy for human involvement would be to edit the prompt given to GPT-3. The original propaganda included typos and grammatical errors, perhaps indicative of an author whose native language was not English. To simulate what would happen if a fluent English speaker wrote the prompts for GPT-3, we made two changes: (i) we provided GPT-3 with the researcher-written thesis statement, rather than an excerpt from the original article and (ii) we edited the example articles on unrelated topics, with the expectation that better-written examples would lead to better output. As Fig. 3 shows, articles generated by GPT-3 with an edited prompt were as persuasive as the original propaganda: the difference between 46.4 and 47.4% was small and not statistically significant.

Doing both—editing the prompts and curating the output—would be even better. If a propagandist edited the input and selected the best of the three outputs on each topic, the GPT-3-generated propaganda would be even more persuasive than the original propaganda (52.7% compared to 47.4%). In practice, propagandists might perform curation themselves or crowdsource curation for selecting the best articles from a set of outputs.

GPT-3 performance on additional metrics

One potential critique of our study is that our article generation process and experimental design might favor GPT-3 on the persuasiveness measure. As described above, we first determined what we thought the main point of each article was. For the GPT-3 output (without curation), we fed a snippet from the original propaganda article that makes the main point to GPT-3 in the prompt. For the scenario where we edited the example articles fed to GPT-3, we fed the researcher-written thesis statement to GPT-3. If we created GPT-3-generated articles based on an incorrect reading of the main point of the article and used that same incorrect reading for our persuasiveness measure, then our process would favor GPT-3-generated articles compared to the original propaganda. In turn, this might overstate the power of GPT-3 in propaganda campaigns.

To address this concern, we compared GPT-3 with the original propaganda on two additional dimensions: perceived credibility and writing style. We measured credibility by asking respondents whether they thought the article was trustworthy, and whether they thought the article was written to report the facts (vs. to convince the reader of a viewpoint). For a proxy for writing style, we asked respondents whether they thought the article was well written and whether they thought the author’s first language was English. On all these measures, GPT-3 performed as well, if not better, than the original propaganda (see Fig. S13 ). Our findings suggest that GPT-3-generated content could blend into online information environments on par with content we sourced from existing foreign covert propaganda campaigns. While this may not be a very high bar (only 38.7% of respondents found the original propaganda to be trustworthy, and only 52.4% thought the original propaganda was well written), language models are quickly improving. If a similar study were run with more powerful models in the future, AI-generated propaganda would likely perform even better.

Our experiment showed that language models can generate text that is nearly as persuasive for US audiences as content we sourced from real-world foreign covert propaganda campaigns. Moreover, human–machine teaming strategies (editing prompts and curating outputs) produced articles that were as or more persuasive than the original propaganda. Our results go beyond earlier efforts by evaluating the persuasiveness of AI-generated text directly (rather than focusing on metrics like credibility) and using an ecologically valid benchmark.

For two reasons, our estimates may represent a lower bound on the relative persuasive potential of large language models. First, large language models are rapidly improving. Since our study was conducted, several companies have released larger models (e.g. OpenAI’s GPT-4) that outperform GPT-3 davinci in related tasks ( 16 ). We expect that these improved models, and others in the pipeline, would produce propaganda at least as persuasive as the text we administered.

Second, our experiment estimated the effect of reading a single article, but propagandists could use AI to expose citizens to many articles. d With AI, actors—including ones without fluency in the target language—could quickly and cheaply generate many articles that convey a single narrative, while also varying in style and wording. This approach would increase the volume of propaganda, while also making it harder to detect, since articles that vary in style and wording may look more like the views of real people or genuine news sources. Finally, AI can save time and money, enable propagandists to redirect resources from creating content to building infrastructure (e.g. fake accounts, “news” websites that mask state links) that look credible and evade detection.

Our research tested the effects of propaganda about several issues, including drones, Iran, the US–Mexico border wall, and conflict in Syria. Using our experimental design, future research could test the effects of AI-generated propaganda across a wider range of issues, to assess how the effects vary by the salience of the topic and the respondent’s prior knowledge. Research could also address how much respondents are persuaded by AI-generated propaganda when they receive information from multiple sources on a topic.

Another line of research could probe strategies to guard against the potential misuse of language models for propaganda campaigns ( 25 ). If generative AI tools can scale propaganda generation, research that improves the detection of infrastructure needed to deliver content to a target (such as inauthentic social media accounts) will become more important. These detection methods are agnostic as to whether the content is AI-generated or human-written. Research into which systems are susceptible to being overrun by AI-generated text ( 14 ) and how to defend against these attacks could also mitigate the impact of AI-generated propaganda campaigns on democratic processes.

Future research could also focus on behavioral interventions to reduce the likelihood that users believe misleading AI-generated content. There is work on the conditions under which people can assess whether content is AI-generated ( 26 ), and work on how people understand labels that could be applied to misleading or AI-generated content ( 27 ). Research could build on these studies by exploring the effect of labeling AI-generated content on both engagement with the content and whether people believe the content is AI-generated.

We preregistered and implemented additional treatment arms using GPT-3 fine-tuned on articles from the Washington Post’s “Politics” section. (See preregistration plan for additional details.) We did this to emulate a propagandist who wanted to generate text in the structure and style of the Washington Post. Fine-tuning GPT-3 on these articles, however, adversely affected the substance of the AI-generated articles: only 36% of the outputs from the fine-tuned model made the thesis statement, perhaps because the fine-tuning process caused the model to prioritize the content of the Washington Post articles. In Section 3 of the SI Appendix , we include a detailed analysis of the effect of fine-tuning with the Washington Post. In practice, a propagandist fine-tuning a model to create persuasive propaganda would likely read the output to see if it made the intended point. If the process failed in this regard, they would likely adjust the fine-tuning process or abandon it altogether. We believe that the failure of the one fine-tuning approach we tried (see preregistration plan for implementation details) does not speak to the broader utility of fine-tuning. Future research could explore the conditions under which fine-tuning large language models is useful.

We made a minor error in constructing the GPT-3 prompt for the “wall” topic, when we intended to select an excerpt from the original “wall” article that makes the main point of the article. SI Appendix 2.A.2 explains this error, and Figs. S9 and S10 show results if this topic is excluded.

In addition, Syria Medical output 3 performed significantly worse than the original propaganda on scaled agreement, but not percent agreement.

Research beginning with Hasher et al. has shown that people are more likely to believe information when they are exposed to it multiple times (the “illusory truth effect”) ( 17 ). Recent experiments have shown that people were more likely to believe false headlines sourced from Facebook around the 2016 US Presidential Election if exposed multiple times ( 18 ), that repeated exposure to content on a social media platform leads to a higher rate of sharing that content ( 19 , 20 ), and that belief in false information continues to grow logarithmically with additional exposures ( 21 ). Repeated exposure has also been linked to real-world harms: Bursztyn et al. found that areas in the United States with greater exposure to a media outlet downplaying the threat of COVID-19 experienced a greater number of cases and deaths ( 22 ). Similarly, research in psychology has shown that people are more likely to believe misinformation when it comes from multiple sources, rather than one (the “multiple source effect”) ( 23 ) and more likely to adopt a position when it is supported by a greater number of arguments ( 24 ).

We thank Siddharth Karamcheti, Percy Liang, Chris Manning, Sara Plana, Girish Sastry, and participants at the International Studies Association Annual Conference and seminars at Georgetown University, the Naval War College, and Stanford University for feedback. We thank OpenAI for providing access to GPT-3 via their academic access program.

Supplementary material is available at PNAS Nexus online.

This research was funded by Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI (grant #216301) and Stanford University’s Center for Research on Foundation Models.

J.A.G. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, wrote the paper. J.C. designed research, performed research. S.G. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, wrote the paper. A.S. designed research. M.T. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, wrote the paper.

An earlier version of this manuscript was posted on a preprint server: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/fp87b .

Data and replication code are available on the Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/LAZ7AA .

Goldstein JA , Grossman S . 2021 Jan . How disinformation evolved in 2020. Brookings Tech Stream [accessed 2022 Dec 6]. https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/how-disinformation-evolved-in-2020/ .

Martin DA , Shapiro JN , Ilhardt JG . 2022 . Introducing the online political influence efforts dataset . J Peace Res . 60 ( 5 ): 868 – 876 .

Google Scholar

Jamieson KH . 2020 . Cyberwar: how Russian hackers and trolls helped elect a president: what we don’t, can’t, and do know . New York : Oxford University Press .

Google Preview

François C , Douek E . 2021 . The accidental origins, underappreciated limits, and enduring promises of platform transparency reporting about information operations . J Online Trust Saf . 1 ( 1 ): 1 – 30 .

Stubbs J . 2020 . Iranian disinformation effort went small to stay under big tech’s radar. Reuters [accessed 2022 Dec 6]. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-facebook-russia/duped-by-russia-freelancers-ensnared-in-disinformation-campaign-by-promise-of-easy-money-idUSKBN25T35E .

Nimmo B , Agranovich D . 2022 . Removing coordinated inauthentic behavior from China and Russia [accessed 2022 Dec 6]. https://about.fb.com/news/2022/09/removing-coordinated-inauthentic-behavior-from-china-and-russia/ .

Frenkel S . 2021 . Iranian disinformation effort went small to stay under big tech’s radar. New York Times [accessed 2022 Dec 6]. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/technology/disinformation-message-apps.html .

Weidinger L . 2022 . Taxonomy of risks posed by language models. In: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '22) (Association for Computing Machinery, New York). p. 214–229 .

Helmore E . 2023 Mar . ‘We are a little bit scared’: OpenAI CEO warns of risks of artificial intelligence. The Guardian [accessed 2023 Aug 18]. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/17/openai-sam-altman-artificial-intelligence-warning-gpt4 .

Nature. 2023 Jun. Stop talking about tomorrow’s AI doomsday when AI poses risks today [accessed 2023 Aug 18]. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02094-7 .

Bommasani R , et al.  2021 . On the opportunities and risks of foundation models, arXiv, arXiv:2108.07258, preprint: not peer reviewed .

Kreps S , McCain RM , Brundage M . 2020 . All the news that’s fit to fabricate: AI-generated text as a tool of media misinformation . J Exp Polit Sci . 9 : 104 – 117 .

Spitale G , Biller-Andorno N , Germani F . 2023 . AI model GPT-3 (dis)informs us better than humans . Sci Adv . 9 ( 26 ): eadh185 .

Kreps S , Kriner DL . 2023 . The Potential Impact of Emerging Technologies on Democratic Representation: Evidence from a Field Experiment . New Media & Society . 14614448231160526.

Buchanan B , Lohn A , Musser M , Sedova K . 2021 . Truth, lies, and automation: how language models could change disinformation. Center for Security and Emerging Technology [accessed 2022 Dec 6]. https://doi.org/10.51593/2021CA003 .

Liang P , et al.  2023 . Holistic evaluation of language models . Transact Mach Learn Res . 2835 – 8856 .

Hasher L , Goldstein D , Toppino T . 1977 . Frequency and the conference of referential validity . J Verbal Learning Verbal Behav . 16 ( 1 ): 107 – 112 .

Pennycook G , Cannon TD , Rand DG . 2018 . Prior exposure increases perceived accuracy of fake news . J Exp Psychol Gen . 147 ( 12 ): 1865 .

Zhou C , Zhao Q , Lu W . 2015 . Impact of repeated exposures on information spreading in social networks . PLoS One . 10 ( 10 ): e0140556 .

Vellani V , Zheng S , Ercelik D , Sharot T . 2023 . The illusory truth effect leads to the spread of misinformation . Cognition . 236 : 105421 .

Hassan A , Barber SJ . 2021 . The effects of repetition frequency on the illusory truth effect . Cogn Res Princ Implic . 6 ( 1 ): 1 – 12 .

Bursztyn L , Rao A , Roth CP , Yanagizawa-Drott DH . 2020 . Misinformation during a pandemic. Technical Report, National Bureau of Economic Research .

Harkins SG , Petty RE . 1987 . Information utility and the multiple source effect . J Pers Soc Psychol . 52 ( 2 ): 260 .

Calder BJ , Insko CA , Yandell B . 1974 . The relation of cognitive and memorial processes to persuasion in a simulated jury trial . J Appl Soc Psychol . 4 ( 1 ): 62 – 93 .

Goldstein JA , et al . 2023 . Generative language models and automated influence operations: emerging threats and potential mitigations, arXiv, arXiv:2301.04246, preprint: not peer reviewed .

Groh M , et al . 2023 . Human detection of political speech deepfakes across transcripts, audio, and video, arXiv, arXiv:2202.12883, preprint: not peer reviewed .

Epstein Z , Fang CM , Arechar AA , Rand DG . 2023 . What label should be applied to content produced by generative AI? PsyArXiv, preprint: not peer reviewed .

Author notes

Supplementary data, email alerts, citing articles via.

• Contact PNAS Nexus
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Journals Career Network

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 2752-6542
• Copyright © 2024 National Academy of Sciences
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Animal Farm — The use of power and propaganda in animal farm

The Use of Power and Propaganda in Animal Farm

• Categories: Animal Farm George Orwell Propaganda

About this sample

Words: 1721 |

Published: Jun 29, 2018

Words: 1721 | Pages: 4 | 9 min read

Works Cited

• Anderson, M. (2012). Propaganda Techniques. In M. A. Genovese (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century (pp. 623-625). New York: Infobase Publishing.
• Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co.
• Botsford, K. (2015). Language and Propaganda. In K. Botsford (Ed.), Propaganda and Persuasion (6th ed., pp. 117-146). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
• Ellul, J. (1965). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. New York: Vintage Books.
• Orwell, G. (1946). Animal Farm. London: Secker and Warburg.
• Pratkanis, A. R., & Aronson, E. (1992). Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company.
• Stanley, J. (2015). How Propaganda Works. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Sunstein, C. R. (2017). #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Tifft, S. E. (2005). Analyzing Propaganda. In S. E. Tifft & P. M. Myers (Eds.), Handbook of Political Communication Research (pp. 263-279). New York: Routledge.
• Welch, D. (2001). Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933-1945. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Prof. Kifaru

Verified writer

• Expert in: Literature Sociology

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 975 words

3 pages / 1269 words

3 pages / 1142 words

2 pages / 887 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Animal Farm

In allegorical novella Animal Farm, Snowball is a dynamic and complex character who plays a significant role in the unfolding of the story. As one of the pigs who leads the rebellion against the human farmer, Snowball is [...]

Animal Farm by George Orwell is a timeless allegorical novel that explores themes of power, corruption, and leadership through the lens of a group of farm animals who overthrow their human owner. Snowball, a spirited and [...]

Animal Farm is a timeless and thought-provoking piece of literature that continues to resonate with readers around the world. Written as an allegory of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism, the novel is replete with [...]

In George Orwell's allegorical novella, Animal Farm, the theme of pathos is intricately woven throughout the narrative, evoking a range of emotions in readers as they follow the plight of the animals on the farm. From the [...]

Animal Farm serves as a powerful reminder of the dangers of unchecked power and the ease with which it can be corrupted. Through the character of Napoleon and the events that unfold on the farm, George Orwell illuminates the [...]

The novel Animal Farm, written by George Orwell, tells a story that uses animals to illustrate the story of the rule that Joseph Stalin implemented on the Soviet Union. The writing made him unpopular because he wrote the story [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• < Previous

Home > The Dominican Experience > Student Scholarship > Senior Theses > 76

Senior Theses

Roman propaganda in the age of augustus.

Alex Pollok , Dominican University of California Follow

Graduation Date

Document type.

Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department or Program Chair

Jordan Lieser, PhD

First Reader

This paper is an examination of the methods and utilizations of propaganda in the Late Republic/Early Imperial period of Ancient Rome. The focus is on the propaganda of Augustus Caesar whose rulership ushered in the era referred to as the Pax Romana or Roman Peace. Augustus created a mythical image of himself that served as inspiration for future emperors. This image and its influence on future Romans is also examined. Today, we have film and/or television acting as the primary focal point for propaganda. In ancient Rome, the primary methods were literature, statues, monuments, and coins (though these are still used today as well). This paper will examine Augustus’ use of propaganda to seize power and also to remain in power in a monumentally transformative period of the Roman Empire now known as the Pax Romana.

Since May 15, 2017

Included in

Ancient History, Greek and Roman through Late Antiquity Commons , Classical Archaeology and Art History Commons , Classical Literature and Philology Commons , Political History Commons

https://doi.org/10.33015/dominican.edu/2017.HIST.ST.03

Advanced Search

• Notify me via email or RSS
• Collections
• Disciplines
• Expert Gallery

Author Corner

• Thesis Style Guides
• Submission Guidelines
• Learn more about the Dominican Experience
• Dominican Scholar Feedback

Home | About | FAQ | My Account | Accessibility Statement

Privacy Copyright

AI-Generated Propaganda Is Just as Persuasive as the Real Thing, Worrying Study Finds

ONE EMAIL. ONE STORY. EVERY WEEK. SIGN UP FOR THE VICE NEWSLETTER.

By signing up, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy & to receive electronic communications from Vice Media Group, which may include marketing promotions, advertisements and sponsored content.