# What is propaganda, and how do you recognize it in the news?

> Propaganda is defined by who is speaking and why, not by whether it's false. Here is where the word comes from, who runs it now, and 6 checks that find it on any page.

Source: https://informed.now/blog/what-is-propaganda

By Shrestha Saha · November 1, 2026 · News Curation

**Summary:** Propaganda is organized persuasion run by a sponsor to move a public toward the sponsor's goal, and it is defined by who is speaking and why, not by whether the message is false. Most of it is one-sided rather than fabricated, which is why fact-checking alone doesn't catch it. The way to recognize it is to find the sponsor, count the sides, and notice when a claim feels true only because you've seen it before.

Propaganda is rarely a lie. It's more often a true fact chosen for you by someone who needs you to act on it, with the facts that point the other way left out. A piece can pass every fact-check and still be propaganda, and a piece can contain an honest error and not be. The questions that sort them are who is speaking, what they want from you, and what they decided you didn't need to see.

### Where the word comes from, and what it means now

The word is older than the practice it now names. Dictionary.com [traces](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/propaganda) it to a committee of cardinals that Pope Gregory XV set up in 1622 to spread the Catholic faith, and its modern definition there is "information, ideas, or rumors deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc." Note what that definition doesn't say: It doesn't say false.

The man who did most to shape the modern meaning was proud of it. Edward Bernays, who ran publicity campaigns for corporations and for the US government, opened his 1928 book [Propaganda](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78634) by calling "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses" an important part of democratic society, and he called the people who do it "an invisible government." To him, propaganda was organized persuasion, and a public service.

The academic definition most often used today is less admiring. In their textbook Propaganda and Persuasion, the American communication scholars Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell [define](https://libapps.salisbury.edu/nabb-online/exhibits/show/propaganda/what-is-propaganda-) propaganda as "the deliberate and systematic attempt to influence perception and affect behavior in ways that further the desired objectives of the propagandist." 3 words carry the weight. Deliberate means someone chose to do it. Systematic means it's a campaign, not a remark. Propagandist means there is a sponsor whose objectives the message serves, whether or not the sponsor's name is on it.

### The 7 techniques from 1937 still cover most of it

In 1937, a group of American educators founded the Institute for Propaganda Analysis to teach the public to spot the persuasion techniques then pouring in from Europe and from home. The institute [named](https://propagandacritic.com/previous-version-propaganda-critic/articles/intro.ipa.html) 7, which it called "devices," and all 7 still show up in today's social media feeds almost unchanged.

- **Name-calling** gives an idea a bad label so you reject it without examining the evidence. "Regime," "mob," and "elite" do this work.
- **Glittering generalities** do the reverse, attaching a virtue word such as "freedom" or "the people" so you accept something without examination.
- **Transfer** borrows the authority of something respected, a flag, a uniform, a scientist's title, and attaches it to the message.
- **Testimonial** has a respected or hated person say the idea is good or bad.
- **Plain folks** presents the speaker as one of you.
- **Card stacking** selects the facts and illustrations that make the best or worst possible case and omits the rest.
- **Bandwagon** says everybody is doing it, so you should too.

Card stacking is the one the other 6 serve, and it's the reason fact-checking misses propaganda: Every fact in the stack can be true, and the deception is in which facts were chosen.

### Who runs it now, and at what scale

The sponsors in 1937 were governments and parties, and they still are. The most recent global inventory of organized social media manipulation by the Oxford Internet Institute, a research department at the University of Oxford, [published](https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/social-media-manipulation-by-political-actors-now-an-industrial-scale-problem-prevalent-in-over-80-countries-annual-oxford-report/) in January 2021, found organized campaigns in 81 countries, up from 70 the year before. In 62 of them, a government agency was using what the researchers call computational propaganda, meaning automated accounts and paid posters pushing political messages, to shape public attitudes, and in 48, state actors had hired private communications firms to run it, with almost $60 million spent on firms that use automated accounts to amplify political messages.

Freedom House, a US nonprofit that rates political freedom around the world, has tracked the same trend for longer. Its Freedom on the Net [report](https://freedomhouse.org/article/new-report-persistent-authoritarian-repression-and-backsliding-democracies-drive-15th) for 2025 said that one of the conditions it scores, whether online information is manipulated by governments or other powerful actors, "has undergone the most consistent global decline over the past 15 years." In plain terms, of everything Freedom House measures about the internet, government manipulation of what people read online is the problem that has worsened most steadily, year after year, since 2010. The reason it gave: "Authorities seek to promote favored narratives and warp public discourse," meaning governments push the stories they want believed and distort public debate. The 2026 edition, [released](https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2026/seismic-shifts-global-internet) in October 2026 and covering June 2025 to May 2026, recorded the 16th consecutive year of global decline: Conditions worsened in 16 of the 38 countries assessed and improved in 8, with China, Myanmar, and Iran the worst environments and Estonia the freest.

The newest audience for propaganda isn't human. In February 2024, France's government agency VIGINUM [documented](https://info.alethea.com/research-how-disinformation-reaches-ai-chatbots) a network of pro-Kremlin websites it called Portal Kombat, and in February 2025 the American Sunlight Project, a US nonprofit that tracks disinformation, mapped 182 of its domains publishing roughly 3.6 million articles a year. Almost nobody reads them. They exist to be swallowed up by AI chatbots, which learn from huge amounts of text collected from the web, so that the network's claims come back out when someone asks a chatbot a question. Researchers call this LLM grooming, after the large language models that power chatbots. When NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of news websites, [tested](https://cybernews.com/news/chatbots-chatgpt-4-russian-propaganda-war/) 10 leading chatbots in March 2025 on false claims that the network, then counted at 150 sites, had pushed, the chatbots repeated the network's false claims in 33% of their answers, or about 1 in 3. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford, in its 2026 Digital News [Report](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026/dnr-executive-summary), drawn from 97,520 people in 48 markets, finds 10% of people now use AI chatbots for news, up from 7% a year earlier. A sponsor who can seed the answer engine no longer needs to reach the reader at all.

### Why it works on people who know better

The technique underneath all 7 is repetition, and repetition works even on people who know the facts. In 2015, the psychologist Lisa Fazio and colleagues at Duke University [showed](https://scholars.duke.edu/publication/1090926) that reading a false statement twice made it feel truer even to people who had the correct fact in memory, a failure the authors named knowledge neglect. The paper's own example is "The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth": Readers who knew the answer was the Pacific still rated the sentence as more likely true after seeing it repeated. In 2018, the psychologists Gordon Pennycook, Tyrone Cannon, and David Rand [found](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6279465) the same effect for real fake-news headlines taken from Facebook, across 3 studies of 409, 949, and 940 people. Seeing a headline once made people rate it as more accurate when they saw it again, the effect was still there a week later, and it held even when the headline carried a fact-checker's warning label. The only headlines repetition could not help were absurd ones: Seeing "The Earth is a perfect square" twice made nobody more likely to believe it.

That limit is the useful lesson. Propaganda does not bother with claims nobody could believe. It works with claims that could be true, because for those, seeing the claim a second time makes it feel more true, and you don't notice that the feeling came from the repetition rather than from any evidence. We described the same pattern in our [article](https://informed.now/blog/what-is-negativity-bias) on negativity bias: Your brain reacts to a message before you have had a chance to judge whether it is true.

### The objection that everything is propaganda

The strongest objection comes from the definition itself. If propaganda is a deliberate, systematic effort to shape perceptions for a sponsor, then advertising is propaganda, a campaign speech is propaganda, and a public-health poster is propaganda. If that is right, calling something propaganda tells you nothing, because every message comes from someone who wants something from you.

The answer is disclosure. An advertisement is labeled as one, a candidate's interest is known, and an opinion column carries a byline, while propaganda hides who is paying or hides the facts that cut against it. The distinction between an error and a campaign is the same one we drew in our [article](https://informed.now/blog/misinformation-vs-disinformation) on misinformation and disinformation: The motive behind the message, not its accuracy.

### How to recognize propaganda in 6 checks

Each check looks at something you can see on the page. None of them requires you to know whether the claim is true.

1. **Find the sponsor.** Open the site's "about" page and look for who owns it and who funds it. A newsroom, a think tank, a party, and a government all publish, and each is fine to read once you know which one you're reading. If 2 clicks don't tell you who pays, treat everything on the site as sponsored by someone who chose not to say.
2. **Count the sides.** On any contested question, look for the strongest fact that cuts against the piece's conclusion. An honest article states it and answers it. Card stacking leaves it out or states a weak version. A piece with no inconvenient fact in it has been curated, and you should ask by whom.
3. **Strip the labels and see what's left.** Cross out the name-calling and the virtue words, "regime," "patriots," "elites," "freedom," and read the sentence that remains. If a claim you could check, with a source, is still there, the labels were decoration on a real argument. If nothing checkable is left once the labels are gone, the labels were the whole argument, and there was never a fact to check.
4. **Check the repetition.** If the same wording appears across many outlets on the same day, it came from one place. Wire copy does this legitimately and says so with a credit line, as we explained in our [article](https://informed.now/blog/news-wire-services) on wire services. Identical wording with no shared credit is coordinated messaging.
5. **Look for the ask.** Jowett and O'Donnell's definition ends in behavior. Propaganda leaves you with an instruction and a target: Vote, share, boycott, distrust these people. An explanatory article leaves you with information you could use in several ways. An opinion column asks too, and is labeled.
6. **Notice when something feels true before you've checked it.** Fazio's and Pennycook's studies show that the feeling of truth is often the feeling of having seen the claim before. If you can't say where you first learned it, you haven't learned it. You've only seen it somewhere, probably more than once, and repeated sightings are exactly what a propaganda campaign is built to produce.

What these checks can't tell you is whether the claim is accurate. A sponsored, one-sided, repeated piece can be true in every particular, which is exactly why sponsors prefer that kind. The checks tell you how much of the picture you've been shown and by whom, and that is enough to decide how much weight to give it.

Each of the 6 summaries in our weekday brief at [informed.now](https://informed.now) names its source inside the summary, so the first check is done before you start reading, and the brief is paid for by its readers rather than by anyone who needs you to reach a conclusion.

The next time a story leaves you angry at a group of people and sure of what should be done about them, go to the site's about page before you share it. Write down who funds it and what fact the story left out. If you can't find the first and can't think of the second, you've read propaganda, and it worked exactly as designed.