Propaganda through media

Propaganda is a form of persuasion that is often used in media to further some sort of agenda, such as a personal, political, or business agenda, by evoking an emotional or obligable response from the audience. It includes the deliberate sharing of realities, views, and philosophies intended to alter behavior and stimulate people to act.

To explain the close associations between media and propaganda, Richard Alan Nelson observed propaganda as a form of persuasion with intention with the aid of controlled transmission of single-sided information through mass media. Mass media and propaganda are inseparable. Mass media, as a system for spreading and relaying information and messages to the public, plays a role in amusing, entertaining and informing individuals with rules and values that situate them in social structure.

Propaganda creates conflicts among society's differing classes. In a media engulfed society, mass media is the main platform and output for carrying out acts of propaganda and for pushing forward agendas. Various amounts of modern media can be used to supply propaganda to its intended audience such as, radio, television, films posters handouts music smartphones, just to name a few.

Spoken forms of propaganda can exist in an oral-biased society. "Propaganda" has a negative connotation in a modern political context. Despite that, the word entered language with religious origins. Pope Gregory XV established an institution for spreading the faith and addressing a series of church affairs, which is namely the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. Further, a College of Propaganda was set up under Pope Urban VIII to train priests for missions.

Throughout history, propaganda has always been evident in momentum social movements such as American independence, the French Revolution, and especially during wartimes. Wartime propaganda is often demanded for shaping public opinions to gain more allies on an international level, as well as calling for citizens to make a contribution and sacrifice to the war on a domestic level. Propaganda was used in the media when the thirteen colonies were trying to separate from Britain. One example from this time period is the Boston Massacre. After this event, the colonists began putting forms of propaganda into the newspapers in an attempt to get more people to rebel against the British.

Governments during the First World War devoted massive resources and huge amounts of effort to producing material designed to shape opinion and action internationally. As Clark claimed, posters in wartime with some visual codes are powerful tools to make people adapt to the new conditions and norms arising from the wars and to accommodate the needs of the war. During the Second World War, the power of propaganda came to the extreme, under the horrors of Nazi Germany. And since then, the word carries more negative connotations than neutral.

With the widespread use of social media platforms, they have become powerful tools for propaganda. Propaganda is promoted on social media by dozens of governments. The Economist reported that in 2020, 81 countries waged "organized disinformation campaigns", up from 27 in 2017. Another element that makes social media effective for sharing propaganda is that it can reach many people with little effort and users can filter the content to remove content they do not want while retaining what they would like to see. This ease of use can be used by ordinary people as well as government agencies and politicians, who can take advantage of the platforms to spread "junk" news in favor of their cause.

The Facebook pages of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces in 2013 and 2014, uses images to promote their agendas relating to politics during the conflicts following 2011 uprisings in Syria. Their government uses visual frames to help support the image that President Assad is a "fearless leader protecting its people and that life has continued normally through Syria," and to help strengthen the images of the violence and sufferings of the civilians caused by the Assad regime.