It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through.
I still think that soft power helped the US tremendously. For all their faults i really had a very positive view on the US, most of it was coloured through soft power. “Inventing” modern democracy, liberating EU from the nazis, Rock’n’Roll, hippie movement, Hollywood, early internet culture - all that overshadowed the imperialism.
Now the mask has come off. And I believe you are right that it ultimately may not matter too much. But then again I doubt the US will be able to style itself again as the “good guys”, the ones who spread democracy to all the oppressed people and and so on without significant effort.
The United States has nothing now, back to imperialism it seems.
Everyone can feel censorship, everyone can learn what they're punished for saying.
Propaganda, though, that can feel like learning, like personal growth and development.
If censorship comes with a stick, propaganda is a carrot.
And today, we have as much of a problem with metaphorical obesity as with literal obesity.
One way is simple repetition of the exact same thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
Another is to have many different lies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
Taking a step back, there is another way for propaganda to function that doesn't even require being the main source, but simply to make the lie so huge that people can't process the idea someone would be *that* level of dishonest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
Consider your own previous comment:
> you get one half truth from one source, another half truth from another source, then two halves make whole truth.
What happens when one source says that the Alpha Party* consists of child-eating devil-worshiping lizards from Alpha Ceti 5 who caused the 9/11 attacks to cover up how the mind-control chemtrail fluid they were making in the WTC burned hot enough to melt steel beams, and the other source says the Alpha Party is standing on a platform of reducing the tax burden on hard-working families?
The latter can be a half-truth, but you don't get even a little closer to a full truth by adding any part of the "other side".
* A made-up party, any similarities to actual persons is coincidence and all the usual disclaimer.
They clearly did work, though.
Problem? No, the problem isn't their very happening, it's more that they are effective strategies. Some also used by advertising agencies.
> And the very fact that you know about child-eating devil-worshiping lizards from Alpha Ceti 5 shows that an opinion is available no matter what propaganda you use against it as long as it's not censored.
I don't know anything about child-eating devil-worshiping lizards from Alpha Ceti 5, that doesn't mean I can't talk about them. It's called "making stuff up".
Not sure where you're going with that sentence though. You do realise, I hope, that this was supposed to be a string of nonsense? That the point was that no matter which half you take from a string of nonsense, you can't combine it with a half-truth to get a full truth, you just get a half truth with a different false part.
Which in this example might be something like "the Alpha Party* caused the 9/11 attacks to cover up how the mind-control chemtrail fluid they were making in the WTC burned hot enough to melt steel beams, and wants to reduce the tax burden on families where the parents earn more than double the national average income between them".
The half-truth remains, at best, a half-truth. But that's the best case, and you only get that if you already knew what part was less than honest before you considered what to dismiss, at which point you didn't need anything from other statements in the first place.
> You can suppress it only by censorship, not by propaganda.
That's the point of disagreement: you, as a human, can only pay attention to so much. For example, if I buy all the ad space around you and fill it with only my own message, that is propaganda that denies the same space to anyone who wants to tell the truth.
> In any case using shitposting sites as a source of information is tricky, journalism isn't that bad yet.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/09/25/1-in-5-am...
* A made-up party, any similarities to actual persons is coincidence and all the usual disclaimer etc etc.
No, it's a page out of the old fascist playbook where flooding the stage with propaganda generates enough confusion to help fascists further their hateful agenda.
I'm not sure about modern fascists, but US politics does look rather Kayfabe-y to me. Fake opposition, there for the purpose of being an opponent.
Of course then you get all the discourse about what even counts as fascism, and someone brings up that the origin of the word is the Roman "fasces" (bundle of sticks) and how that etymological root points to the concept of "strength through unity" which is also why the Lincoln memorial has Lincoln resting his hands on them[0] and why trade unions often use the "strength through unity" phrasing (and get annoyed/upset by the connection).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lincoln_Memorial_statue_a...
You can tell they've never read his work because his conclusion in the end is that you should tolerate intolerance up and until it promotes specific violence.
So total freedom of speech up and until it starts inciting violence. It's basically the same stance the US Constitution has.
It often doesn't at all, drowned amongst lies.
And sometimes it takes a lifetime or two.
It took Boris Yeltsin, who had just become the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, actually visiting a random grocery store in Houston before he realised what the truth was:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_visit_by_Boris_Yeltsin_to...
This was a communist apparatchik. Its like showing truth to MAGA people. Most wont accept it.
Could be. That was the other example I was considering using besides Yeltsin, but I figured it would immediately get met with "no u" responses from those who, as you say, won't accept it. That makes for boring conversations where I learn nothing.
Even in democratic societies politicians don't change their beliefs so fast (maybe most human?). But luckily we can vote them out so this is not a big problem.
Good luck, Earthlings ...
Yeah I agree, we shouldn't be too concerned about Iran, Russia, or China, censoring the internet, the truth gets through.
"Global tariffs all over the spectrum help the US economy! Look at my Beautiful Big Chart !" ... yeah, right.
Statists, failing to admit their guilt, blame everyone but themselves.
And no, the truth does not get through, even after centuries.
Promoting truth and opposing lies are the same thing.
I wouldn't be so sure. Significant part of Russian population believes that they are purging Ukraine of evil nazis, for example. Or that WW2 started on 22 June 1941.
The world is yet to find a single piece of truth coming out of the Trump administration. I mean, shall we discuss how Trump claims the Epstein files exonerate him when he is reported as directly, deeply, and personally involved in every single gruesome aspect of the criminal organization?
> And truth.
In short, propaganda.
Propaganda (noun): Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented. Propaganda can be found in a wide variety of different contexts.[0]
Preventing non-ideal outcomes is not about lying, but not doing things you might regret in the future.
This is why I'm no politician, though.
There's also debate and ego-less teaching for the sake of truth-seeking.
My ego prefers to be the kind of person who ends up at truth over being one who has fooled themselves into thinking they have already found it, which makes changing my mind easier than others find it.
I am pleased to say, others have also remarked that I am closer to this ideal than others they know.
Yeah, that's what everyone says.
One of my childhood life-lessons, which took far too many examples to internalise, was all the people who are very happy to follow the crowd because it is the crowd.
In fact, what you're doing now suggests my approach is so alien to you that you yourself are right now not only not even telling yourself this but also labelling yourself as someone who does not say this.
Scount mindset: the discovery of the truth to the best of our ability without fear or favour.
The metaphor is: A scout who tells the general his troops are strong when they are weak, that the enemy is weak when it is strong, is a bad scout.
The opposite is a soldier mindset: a soldier who fears to fight when ordered, no matter the strength of the enemy, isn't a good soldier.
You can call the search for truth an agenda in its own right if you wish, but it lacks the "primarily used to influence or persuade" aspect of propaganda.
That's a mind-slave mindset. Why is the scout working for the general and not for himself?
And a general needs the same *mindset*, even if they must also engage in performative ho-rah-ing to the troops.
A general may need to order their troops to die for the greater good, they may need to lie to the troops to up morale, but if a general lets themselves believe they're strong when they're weak, they're bad at being generals. If they don't listen to their scouts, if they shoot the messenger, they're bad at being generals.
https://archive.org/details/AllArtIsPropagandaCriticalEssays...
This is only cringy lousy provocation for appearance of moral superiority.
Coming from a government notorious for spying on it's citizens it seems pretty ludicrous.
At the same time, I do not understand how what you wrote is in any way relevant to the topic.
In any case, you’re right. The only concern is that projects like this that start in Europe often end up being acquired by American companies, so I’m worried it could end up the same way.
If by "western" you meant some other power then you should be specific. Western as a term is imprecise and can be interpreted differently depending on the audience.
From my memory (might be mistaken) there have been attempts to somewhat study this via polls etc, and determined that coverage via propaganda (specifically Fox News) is less helpful then randomly guessing what actually happened...
But ymmv, social studies are always hard to trust, because it's borderline impossible to prove cause and effect
Ironically the studies of that nature are often themselves a form of propaganda, because it's entirely straightforward to structure the study to produce your preferred outcome.
There is a well-known human bias where people use information they know to try to guess information they don't. If you're given three random people and the only thing anyone has told you about them is that one is a drug addict and then you're asked to guess which one is a thief, more people are going to guess the drug addict. So now all you have to do is find a situation where the thief isn't actually the drug addict, let the media outlet tell people which one is the drug addict, and you'll have people guessing the wrong answer a higher proportion of the time than they would by choosing at random.
I hope it's not me, whom you responded to, because I cannot fathom how you could've gotten that impression considering my phrasing...what's up with this topic getting so many people with arguing via complete strawmen
Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives
>If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any [bad stuff]
Education works. It doesn't work perfectly.
Education doesn't cause good choices but it is sometimes correlated to better situations, the difference between the criminals in prison and the ones in the C suite is only education.
This assumes that a) everyone is the same, and b) education would always work. Matthew Perry explained that this is not the case. Some people respond differently to drugs. Whether these people are educated or not, changes very little. Education helps, but not in the way as to be able to bypass physiological aspects completely.
> Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives
Education can still help. For instance, I decided very early on that the best way to avoid e. g. addiction is to not "give in and try once". So I never tried drugs (ok ok, I did drink a beer occasionally). This was the much simpler and easier strategy to pursue, simply via avoidance behaviour.
Thus I disagree that the premise can be "if educating worked" - people will always respond differently to drugs. And they will have different strategies to cope with something too - some strategies work, others don't work. One can not generalize this.
If you oppose these speech bans... Why you're as silly as a preacher telling teens not to fuck!
And the failure of education was an intentional feature, not a bug, since the government wants obedient tax cattle that will easily accept their propaganda at elections, not freethinkers that question everything because then they might notice your lies and corruption.
It's like building a backdoor into your system thinking you're the only one who gets to use it for the upper hand, but then throw fits when everyone else is using your backdoors to defeat you.
Freedom of speech for me, not for thee
The whole truth here would be that technically he did not do it unilaterally but as a representative of his voters, so basically almost as far from unilaterally as possible.
Don’t be obtuse
The president runs VOA, it's not some separate entity he decided to censor.
You're talking about an administration that actively tries to censor candidates of opposition candidates through both state regulatory institutions such as the FCC and business collusion, a typical play out of the fascist playbook with state and oligarchs colluding to strong arm their political goals.
It's also the same administration who is actively involved in supporting other dictatorial regimes and destabilize Europe, including with very explicit and overt threats of war of invasion to annex territories.
It's also the same administration that is clearly a puppet administration controlled by another totalitarian regime - Russia.
There is no soft power in this stunt. Only further self-destructive actions to further kill the US's relevance as an European ally.