All the media available is used to spread modern propaganda to spread its message, including the internet, television, meetings, monuments, billboards, sporting events, music, speeches, and awards and prizes. It is easy to not even recognize propaganda as such. For the purpose of our paper we will focus on mainly the usage of the internet in their tactics of shaping people’s opinions. The internet (online articles, social media, and advertisement) is important because the most current news, fame updates, and trends, as well as propaganda, are spread through it every day. Propaganda is most commonly spread as the manipulated truth. One of the ways propaganda is fed to us is through fake or biased news articles.
Fake news has been used since the beginning of the press and is still being used to persuade people over the internet: e.g. Kylie Jenner Pregnant! Logan Paul Back to Vlogging! and Bat Boy Lives! Some fake online news sites such as The Onion are supposed to be satirical and make light of all the bad in the world. There are others, however, that are not joking and solicit fake news as the truth. These are the sites and the propaganda that can hurt us.
If lies and filtered truths are being spread then where is the line between the truth and a lie? Social media is another huge cause of spreading propaganda. Posts from “reliable” sources and “verified” accounts are not always truthful and almost never unbiased and often hearsay. Often Youtubers, Instagram Stars, and other large social media influencers use propaganda to either make themselves look better or other people look worse. Some modern examples of this is Youtube and it’s history of ‘Clickbait.’ Clickbait headlines work in two parts.
The first part explains the plot which is usually very catchy and the second part says that there is more to the plot and that the outcome is quite astonishing. The bait lies in the second part because it challenges our imagination power by using the phrases like: ‘…You won’t believe…’, ‘…shocking result’, ‘…too good to be true’ etc.
