[torpid]

Imagine thinking this...

>"Propaganda is information (delivered through any medium) designed to persuade, manipulate emotion, and change opinion rather than to inform using logical truths and facts. The aim of propaganda is to change minds via the use of emotion, misinformation, disinformation, truths, half-truths, and cleverly selected facts; not to enlighten (although one can technically propagandize true information, using emotion to sell truth, this generally isn’t what we are talking about when we use the term “propaganda”

Then saying this...

>Propaganda isn’t bad by its nature (after-all, almost any content that relays information can be considered a form of propaganda).

What the fuck. No, any content that relays information is NOT a form of propaganda.

[hezag]

Information is not — by itself — a form of propaganda, but any "content that relays information" (e.g. an article that uses a chosen subset of the available information about something to expose a point of view) can be considered a form of propaganda.

[zinekeller]

> No, any content that relays information is NOT a form of propaganda.

Except... that's the literal meaning of propaganda (it's literally Italian for "propagation"). It's only in the Cold War era (only relatively recently in the time-span of history) that "propaganda" have added that negative connotation.

[throwaway292893]

Trying to spin a strict definition of propaganda to include all propagation of information is disingenuous, regardless of where the original word came from.

And even then you're wrong, you have to go back much earlier to find the shift in definition of the term. The negative connotation that led to our modern definition originated in the French Revolution, not the Cold War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda#cite_ref-13

> Academic Barbara Diggs-Brown conceives that the negative connotations of the term “propaganda” are associated with the earlier social and political transformations that occurred during the French Revolutionary period movement of 1789 to 1799 between the start and the middle portion of the 19th century, in a time where the word started to be used in a nonclerical and political context.

Before the French Revolution the term was used by the Catholic church and was considered "an ancient and honorable term".

https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-hist...

WWI & II made the modern definition we know today popular, but both the American and French revolution guided it there.