By Avni
Most of the people reading this article must follow the news regularly but are you watching news or propaganda?
“Truth is hard, propaganda is cheap.”
DaShanne Stokes
Every day we hear propaganda disguised as news. So what exactly is propaganda?
To make it easier, propaganda can unambiguously be explained as information often only giving one part of an argument that is in some other way spread to influence people’s opinions. China’s government used many dirty tactics like using Twitter and Facebook accounts that spread hate about Hong Kong depicting the protests as violent acts. These were clearly propaganda-driven and were taken down by Twitter and Facebook.
While going through the examples of the protests, some of them seemed quite believable to me at first, but after rereading them, I could analyse the truth.
This is when I thought if I could believe in such political propaganda for a while, many others must be doing it too, and what makes it more problematic is they might not even recheck the facts. And this is where lies the second major issue with propaganda, what impact sharing this propaganda could have?
I asked my friend about his opinion regarding these propaganda-based posts, and he replied that, according to him, the acts could have been less violent, and people could have acted calmly.
Misinterpretation of such sensitive topics can cause a lot of clashes between people with different opinions, and people involved can face adverse results too.