Analysis

What propaganda is and how it works: definition, techniques and examples

By Daniel Sardá · April 24, 2026

# What propaganda is and how it works: definition, techniques and examples

Propaganda is often associated with lies, dictatorships or wartime posters. But that idea is too narrow. Propaganda can use falsehoods, but also real facts, half-truths, legitimate emotions and recognizable symbols. What defines it is not only whether the content is true or false, but the deliberate way in which it is selected, ordered and repeated in order to orient an audience’s perception.

In simple terms, propaganda is communication designed to influence collective opinions, emotions or behavior through selection, repetition, emotional charge and interested framing. Its aim is not to help the receiver evaluate a problem in a balanced way, but to push them toward a specific interpretation or conduct.

That is why it is useful to distinguish propaganda from education, ordinary persuasion, advertising and disinformation. There are areas of overlap among all these phenomena, but they are not the same.

This article works as a general framework for understanding several specific techniques of political manipulation already discussed in this series, such as demagoguery, scapegoating, false dichotomy, the moralization of debate and extreme simplification.

What propaganda means

Propaganda is the deliberate and relatively systematic dissemination of information, symbols, arguments, rumors, half-truths or lies with the purpose of shaping collective opinions, emotions or behavior.

Its central feature is intentionality. It is not a spontaneous conversation or an isolated mistake. Propaganda responds to an objective: obtaining adherence, obedience, enthusiasm, resignation, fear, rejection, mobilization or indifference toward a cause, a leader, an enemy or a policy.

A useful operational definition would be this:

Propaganda is communication aimed at shaping perceptions and behavior through selection, repetition, emotional charge and interested framing, rather than through a balanced examination of the evidence.

This helps avoid a common mistake: believing that propaganda simply means “lying.” A propaganda campaign may contain real data. It may also rely on existing problems, understandable emotions or authentic grievances. Manipulation appears when those elements are selected, exaggerated, isolated or reorganized to produce a conclusion that is convenient for whoever emits the message.

Origin of the term propaganda

The word propaganda has an origin prior to its modern political meaning. It comes from the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, a Catholic institution founded in 1622 for the propagation of the faith.

In that context, the term did not necessarily have the negative charge it has today. It referred to the organized diffusion of a religious doctrine. Over time, especially because of its association with wars, totalitarian regimes, mass campaigns and modern political manipulation, the word acquired a much more pejorative meaning.

That historical shift matters because it shows something relevant: propaganda did not begin as a synonym for absolute deception, but as the organized diffusion of a cause. What makes it suspicious in modern usage is its relationship with manipulation, one-sidedness and the subordination of truth to the intended effect.

Propaganda is not simply lying

Reducing propaganda to lying is convenient, but imprecise. A lie can be part of a propaganda campaign, but not all propaganda consists in inventing facts.

Propaganda can operate in several ways:

A message can be propagandistic even if every isolated sentence is technically true, if the whole is designed to hide essential elements and direct the public toward a prefabricated conclusion.

Propaganda, education, persuasion and advertising: key differences

Propaganda vs. education

Education seeks to form judgment. It presents information, nuance, evidence and different perspectives so that the receiver can evaluate for themselves.

Propaganda seeks to orient adherence. It selects the elements that maximize the desired effect and minimizes or excludes anything that could weaken the message.

In brief: education opens judgment; propaganda tries to close it.

Propaganda vs. persuasion

All propaganda tries to persuade, but not all persuasion is propaganda.

A person may persuade honestly: they present arguments, recognize objections, admit limits and allow contrast. Propaganda, by contrast, is usually one-sided, strategic and manipulative. It does not seek open deliberation, but favorable framing.

The boundary is not always clean. A public campaign may be seen by its defenders as the legitimate defense of a cause and by its critics as biased propaganda. That ambiguity is part of the problem.

Propaganda vs. advertising and public relations

Propaganda does not appear only in politics or war. It can also overlap with commercial advertising, public relations, institutional campaigns and corporate communication.

Advertising seeks to sell products, brands or lifestyles. Public relations seeks to manage reputation, legitimacy or consent. Propaganda is distinguished by its more intense orientation toward shaping collective beliefs, identities, obediences or enmities. But in practice there can be overlap.

The figure of Edward Bernays, a pioneer of modern public relations, helps explain that gray area: techniques of managing public opinion can be used to inform, persuade, manipulate or manufacture consent, depending on context and method.

Propaganda vs. disinformation

Disinformation is false or misleading content disseminated with the intention to deceive or obtain political, economic or strategic benefit. Misinformation, by contrast, is false or misleading information shared without a clear harmful intent.

Propaganda is broader. It can use disinformation, but it can also use true information, half-truths, symbols, emotions, silences and repetitions.

In other words: disinformation can be a tool of propaganda, but it does not exhaust the phenomenon of propaganda.

Essential features of propaganda

Propaganda usually has several recognizable features.

Deliberation

It does not appear by accident. It is designed to produce an effect.

Selectivity

It does not show the full picture. It chooses which facts, images, words or symbols are useful, and leaves out what could complicate the narrative.

Symbolic manipulation

It works with words, flags, music, slogans, colors, uniforms, images, heroes, martyrs, enemies, stories and rituals.

Defined objective

It seeks something: adherence, obedience, mobilization, hostility, fear, resignation, enthusiasm or trust.

Concrete audience

It does not speak to “society” in the abstract. It addresses specific publics, with particular fears, desires, prejudices, identities and expectations.

Instrumental use of emotion

Propaganda rarely limits itself to argument. It activates fear, pride, guilt, anger, hope, humiliation, resentment or a sense of belonging.

How propaganda works

Propaganda works because it is not addressed only to explicit reason. It also exploits cognitive shortcuts, social habits, group identities and emotions.

Most people do not evaluate all available information before forming an opinion. They process partial signals: familiarity, repetition, source prestige, group identification, a sense of threat or a promise of security.

That is where propaganda finds its space.

Repetition

A message repeated many times becomes familiar. And what is familiar often feels more credible, even when the content is weak or has been refuted.

Repetition does not need to convince immediately. It can wear down resistance, install a mental association or make an idea seem more widespread than it really is.

Speed

Arriving first matters. The first version of an event often conditions later interpretation. Even if nuance or corrections appear later, the initial frame may remain.

Multichannel saturation

When the same story appears on television, radio, newspapers, social media, political spokespeople, influencers, anonymous accounts and everyday conversation, it gains mental presence. The audience may feel that “everyone is saying it,” even if the original source is one coordinated campaign.

Group identity

Propaganda does not only say “believe this.” It also says “people like you believe this.” That transforms an opinion into a signal of belonging.

Emotion

Fear, anger and pride reduce willingness to review nuance. Propaganda does not necessarily invent those emotions; it often captures them and directs them toward a convenient target.

Media and supports of propaganda

Propaganda does not live only in political speeches. It can operate through almost any symbolic medium:

That breadth matters. Propaganda is not just a text trying to persuade. It is an ecosystem of signs, repetitions, images, emotions and rituals.

Recurring propaganda techniques

Selection and omission

The basic technique consists of showing what is convenient and hiding what obstructs the message.

A government may highlight a public work and ignore its cost overrun. A party may display one crime case and ignore the complete trend. A militant outlet may publish real data, but select only the data that supports its narrative.

Manipulation is not always in what is said. Often it is in what is left out.

Moral simplification

Propaganda reduces complex realities to stories of good and bad: people against enemy, patriots against traitors, victims against conspirators, order against chaos.

That simplification facilitates mobilization. But it also impoverishes public judgment, because it turns problems of evidence, incentives and consequences into battles of moral purity.

Repetition

Repetition installs frames. A slogan repeated for weeks can become common language, even among people who do not fully share the original cause.

Propaganda does not always need to prove. Sometimes it only needs to repeat.

Multichannel saturation

When a narrative arrives through many channels, it gains the appearance of consensus. The receiver does not perceive a campaign, but a climate.

That climate can be more persuasive than an isolated argument.

Emotion before examination

Propaganda seeks to activate a response before the receiver evaluates calmly. Fear, guilt, pride, anger or hope can be used to accelerate adherence.

The problem is not that politics contains emotion. Politics always does. The problem appears when emotion is used to prevent analysis.

Prestige and authority

Propaganda often relies on real or apparent authorities: experts, leaders, heroes, victims, scientists, artists, patriotic symbols or traditions.

The objective is to transfer legitimacy from the symbol to the message.

Fabrication of the enemy

One of the most powerful forms of propaganda is constructing an absolute enemy. That enemy may be internal or external, real or imaginary, powerful or vulnerable.

The fabrication of the enemy performs several functions:

Historical evolution of propaganda

Before the modern era

Although the word propaganda became consolidated in modernity, its principles are very old. Empires, religions, courts and political movements have used emblems, ceremonies, stories, monuments and symbols to shape obedience and legitimacy.

Propaganda was not born with radio or totalitarianism. What changed with modernity was scale.

Mass societies and the modern press

With the growth of the press, literacy, mass parties and industrial communication, propaganda acquired a new capacity: reaching enormous populations quickly, repeatedly and in a coordinated way.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed political influence into an increasingly professionalized activity.

World wars

War turned propaganda into a strategic industry. States needed to recruit soldiers, sell bonds, sustain morale, demonize the enemy and justify sacrifice.

Posters, films, radio, newspapers and speeches became tools of national mobilization. The battle for public opinion became part of war itself.

Twentieth-century totalitarianism

Totalitarian regimes took propaganda to an extreme level. In Nazi Germany, for example, propaganda did not act alone: it combined with censorship, cultural control, political persecution and the systematic construction of the enemy.

The aim was not only to convince people of a specific policy, but to shape a complete worldview: who belonged to the national community, who had to be excluded and what acts could be justified in the name of that community.

Digital environment

Contemporary propaganda does not replace classical propaganda: it accelerates, cheapens and amplifies it.

Today it can circulate through social media, fake accounts, bots, media outlets that appear journalistic, influencers, messaging groups, short videos, memes and coordinated campaigns. It no longer always depends on a centralized ministry. It can operate as a diffuse network, with multiple emitters and formats.

In the digital environment, propaganda also does not always seek to convince people of a coherent thesis. Sometimes it seeks to confuse, saturate, divide or destroy trust in any shared criterion of truth.

Propaganda in democracies and authoritarian regimes

A common mistake is to think propaganda belongs only to dictatorships. It does not.

It can also appear in democracies: war campaigns, public health, elections, social movements, political advertising or moral causes can use propagandistic techniques. That does not mean all are equivalent or equally harmful. It means that the logic of propaganda does not depend exclusively on regime type.

The main difference lies in counterweights.

In a functioning democracy there are, at least ideally, media pluralism, freedom of expression, opposition, independent verification, courts and competing narratives. Those elements do not eliminate propaganda, but they can limit it.

In an authoritarian regime, propaganda and censorship tend to merge. Not only is an official narrative promoted; alternative narratives are also destroyed or punished.

Propaganda and censorship

Propaganda rarely works alone. It is often accompanied by censorship, discrediting of rival sources, control of access to information and pressure on media or dissenting voices.

The combination is especially powerful because it acts in two ways:

When citizens receive only one version, propaganda stops competing with other interpretations and begins to occupy the whole space of what can be thought.

Propaganda and construction of the enemy

The construction of the enemy deserves specific attention because it is one of the most dangerous forms of propaganda.

The propagandistic enemy is not simply an adversary. It is presented as a moral, existential or civilizational threat. It is not answered; it is eliminated, silenced, expelled or neutralized.

This mechanism makes it possible to turn political conflicts into crusades. It also reduces empathy toward the targeted group and prepares the public to tolerate measures that, in another context, could appear inadmissible.

Nazi propaganda is one of the most extreme examples of this logic: it turned pre-existing prejudices into a totalizing narrative of internal enemy, exclusion and persecution.

Propaganda and truth

Propaganda has a complex relationship with truth.

It can lie. It can distort. It can invent enemies. But it can also tell partial truths. Sometimes, in fact, its effectiveness depends on containing something recognizable as true.

The decisive point is not whether every isolated sentence is false. The point is whether the complete message is designed so that the public sees only one part of the problem, feels only certain emotions and discards alternative interpretations.

In the digital era, moreover, some campaigns no longer seek to make people believe one single story. They seek to exhaust, confuse and produce cynicism: “everyone lies,” “nothing can be known,” “every source is bought.” That form of propaganda does not install an alternative truth; it erodes the very possibility of a public conversation based on shared facts.

How to detect propaganda

There is no automatic test, but there are useful signals.

A message deserves suspicion when it presents several of these characteristics:

Media literacy does not consist only in detecting fake news. It also requires recognizing omissions, interested frames, emotional manipulation, false appearances of consensus and coordinated operations of repetition.

Useful questions when facing a propagandistic message

Before accepting a political, institutional or media message, it is useful to ask:

1. Who is emitting this message? 2. What does it want me to think, feel or do? 3. What data does it include and what data does it omit? 4. What emotions is it trying to activate? 5. Does it present one interpretation as if it were the only possible one? 6. Does it construct an absolute enemy? 7. Does it allow doubt or punish nuance? 8. Does it depend on repetition more than evidence? 9. What independent sources allow it to be checked? 10. Who benefits if I accept this frame?

These questions do not eliminate propaganda, but they reduce its effectiveness.

Points of debate about propaganda

Is all propaganda negative?

Not necessarily in a descriptive sense. One can speak of health, patriotic, religious or morally defensible propaganda depending on point of view. A campaign to get vaccinated, donate blood or save energy may use techniques of mass persuasion.

But the term has a negative charge because it usually implies manipulation, one-sidedness and subordination of truth to the desired effect.

Can propaganda be true?

Yes. There can be propaganda based on true facts. What makes something propagandistic does not depend only on falsity, but on the selective, emotional and strategic use of information to direct beliefs and behavior.

Does propaganda disappear with more information?

Not necessarily. More information can help, but it can also saturate. In the digital environment, the abundance of content can facilitate campaigns that imitate journalism, multiply contradictory versions or exhaust the public.

The answer is not only to consume more information, but to improve criteria of evaluation.

Why understanding propaganda matters

Understanding propaganda matters because modern politics is also fought on the terrain of perception. Citizens do not act only on facts, but on interpretations of facts.

When a campaign controls those interpretations through fear, repetition, absolute enemies and strategic omissions, public deliberation degrades.

The problem is not that someone tries to persuade. That is part of politics. The problem appears when persuasion becomes systematic manipulation: when it does not seek to convince with sufficient reasons, but to shape the mental environment in which certain reasons can no longer be considered.

That is why propaganda should not be understood only as a residue of the twentieth century or as a technique exclusive to dictatorships. It remains present in democracies, wars, electoral campaigns, social media, ideological movements, state communication and geopolitical disputes.

Defense against it does not consist in distrusting everything, but in learning to distinguish among information, legitimate persuasion and organized manipulation.

In summary

Propaganda is communication designed to selectively and manipulatively influence collective perceptions, emotions and behavior. It can use lies, but also partial truths. It can operate through states, parties, companies, social movements, media or informal networks. It can appear in dictatorships and also in democracies.

Its strength lies in the combination of selection, repetition, emotion, symbols, authority, omission and construction of the enemy. Its danger lies in the fact that it impoverishes public judgment: it reduces complex problems to convenient frames and turns deliberation into adherence.

The decisive question before any message is not only “is this true or false?” but also: what part of reality is it showing me, what part is it hiding and what does it want me to do with that version of the world?

Sources consulted