Often people say to me well propaganda is just telling people what they want to hear. If they think it anyway and seek reinforcement out aren’t they just giving them what they wanted anyway? Has anything changed. These people miss the point...

The point is to change a behaviour by leveraging one of the things you think people want to hear in a way that moves them. The behaviour you want to change may be entirely irrelevant to the opinion they already hold which you are reinforcing, it’s just a lever, it’s misdirection.

Let’s say you want to divide a party and stop half the people voting. You might amplify whatever divides them. Sure, they already held those views and read news but if you can spread rumours, anger enough to stop them voting... that may not have happened had you not interfered.

You may not care about truth or lies. The point may not be factuality or misleading someone, it’s to divide or to withdraw.

If I’m leveraging your love of football, I might not give a shit about football, I might be trying to steal your data with a game, flick your nationalism button and make your competitive nature engage vs the others.

If I’m asking you about whether it’s cruel to beat seals to death, it might not have anything to do with your love of seals.... etc etc

If I’m drawing you out to protest, I may well not be supporting your cause. I may well be drawing your opponent out to protest against you. I may actually have another objective, of causing a shutdown to advance my business

or increasing tensions, inciting violence in an already volatile community...

You aren’t just telling everyone equally what they want to hear - that wouldn’t change anything. You leverage different things that might be entirely opposed to move groups to create a symphony, to direct the orchestra. To create harmonies or discord.

@ElizabethKamel longer thread!