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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, a writer specializing in politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Our understanding of propaganda is at least half a century out of date.
When we think of propaganda, most of us still picture Soviet posters, Nazi rallies, state television, or authoritarian governments bludgeoning unwilling populations with crude and obvious lies. It is a strangely comforting image because it allows us to imagine that propaganda is always conspicuous, always foreign, and always somebody else’s problem.
As a result, many people in the West continue to consume information as though it were 1995. They imagine news as something that simply happens: Journalists report it, newspapers print it, television presenters read it, and the public learns the truth.
But that world no longer exists, because propaganda evolved while we were busy congratulating ourselves on having outgrown it.
Information is no longer simply reported. It is curated, amplified, algorithmically distributed, and emotionally optimised by journalists, activists, influencers, governments, NGOs, and millions of ordinary people, each contributing, knowingly or otherwise, to the narratives that shape public perception.
The catalyst for all of this was the World Wide Web. In scarcely more than two decades, it transformed the way human beings produce, consume, and distribute information. In evolutionary terms, we are barely five minutes into the experiment, and the preliminary findings are ... not encouraging.
The most effective propaganda of the digital age does not lie particularly often. It doesn’t need to. It simply exercises impeccable editorial judgement, deciding which facts are elevated, which victims become household names, which images circle the globe, and which pieces of context are omitted. Rather than asking us to abandon our values, modern propaganda recruits us into a story that feels both emotionally satisfying and morally obvious.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the public discourse surrounding Israel, which is ultimately just one case study, albeit perhaps the clearest modern illustration of how digital propaganda operates in open societies. Certainly, facts are sometimes fabricated outright. But just as often, and perhaps more powerfully, critical context is omitted, Hamas all but disappears from the story, and Israel inherits responsibility for actions it did not commit.
Repeat that process often enough and people gradually mistake a carefully constructed narrative for reality itself, all while remaining convinced they are far too sophisticated to fall for propaganda.
Ironically, the societies most vulnerable to this new form of propaganda are not closed dictatorships but open democracies, where information flows freely and public opinion shapes political life. Propaganda no longer needs to breach borders or seize state institutions. It merely has to persuade free people to distribute it voluntarily.
The very freedoms that make liberal democracies so successful also make them uniquely vulnerable. High-trust societies depend upon shared expectations of truth, reciprocity, and good faith. Those assumptions work remarkably well when widely shared. They become strategic vulnerabilities in the hands of people and regimes that recognise no such obligations.
Like many millennials, I read the books “1984” and “Animal Farm” in high school. They are among the few books I still think about decades later, which is probably a better advertisement for author George Orwell than my English teacher ever managed.
Orwell warned us about censorship, the corruption of language, and the gradual rewriting of reality. Over the past few decades, liberal democracies have experienced versions of all three. Political language has become increasingly elastic, history is continually revised, and familiar words are routinely repurposed as ideological weapons.
Ironically, even the word propaganda has become so thoroughly politicised that it often amounts to little more than “an argument I disagree with” — which is, admittedly, a remarkably effective way of ensuring nobody recognises actual propaganda anymore.
For years, I assumed Orwell’s warnings applied mainly to other societies. I was looking for authoritarianism wearing the face of my ideological opponents, from the Soviet Union to modern-day North Korea. But after watching the trajectory of the “free” West, I am no longer convinced we were assigned the right novel. We probably should have read “Brave New World.”
Better still, Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” in which he argued that Aldous Huxley, not George Orwell, had more accurately anticipated the dangers of modern media. Huxley envisioned a civilisation so saturated with entertainment and distraction that censorship would become almost unnecessary. People would not be denied the truth; they would simply become too distracted, overwhelmed, or exhausted to look for it. Perhaps Huxley was not predicting the future so much as arriving there ahead of schedule.
The internet has given us access to more information than any civilisation in history. Yet abundance has produced its own form of scarcity: attention. Every waking moment, thousands of voices compete relentlessly for that scarce resource: breaking news, viral outrage, influencers, podcasts, AI-generated slop, celebrity scandals, conspiracy theories, advertisers, activists, politicians, memes, and cat videos. Truth, nuance, and context are forced to compete on exactly the same terms.
Unfortunately, they have one fatal disadvantage: They are rarely as entertaining.
The greatest irony is that, despite unprecedented access to knowledge, we are steadily losing the cognitive habits required to evaluate it. Reading proficiency, educational outcomes, and attention have all declined just as propaganda has become more sophisticated. If the very habits that allow us to evaluate evidence, tolerate complexity, and think critically are being steadily eroded, it should hardly surprise us that propaganda has become more effective than ever.
This is a profoundly different form of manipulation from the one George Orwell feared. The objective is not to prevent people from discovering reality, but to fragment their attention until reality becomes just another voice in an endless digital cacophony. The defining struggle of our age is therefore not simply between truth and falsehood, nor even between truth and censorship. It is between truth and distraction.
This is how entire societies become disoriented — not because our adversaries necessarily possess better arguments, but because they understand our psychological vulnerabilities with extraordinary precision while we still fail to recognise that we are engaged in an information war.
They know which images provoke outrage and which accusations can end a conversation before it has properly begun. They recognise the potent moral force that words such as racism, colonialism, apartheid, genocide, and Islamophobia now carry in Western discourse, and how readily those concepts can be deployed to frame a conflict. Above all, they understand that compassion can be manipulated into a remarkably effective strategic asset.
The result is an oddly asymmetrical contest. They are playing a long game of chess against societies that still, for the most part, believe they are simply watching the evening news.
Human beings were never designed to navigate anything resembling the information environment into which we now plunge ourselves every morning before we have even gotten out of bed. We are not detached, relentlessly rational truth-seeking machines. We are profoundly social, tribal creatures attempting to construct coherent stories from a torrent of information that no human brain evolved to process.
The result is that every day, millions of otherwise sensible people confidently deliver verdicts on military strategy, international law, intelligence operations, and conflicts about which they possess no specialised knowledge whatsoever. The digital age has given us unprecedented access to information. It has not, unfortunately, bestowed expertise.
Faced with that complexity, the human mind instinctively gravitates towards simple moral narratives. We search not for exhaustive explanations, but for coherent stories that satisfy some of our deepest psychological needs: belonging, moral certainty, identity, and meaning.
Modern propaganda exploits those instincts with extraordinary sophistication. Rather than asking us to abandon our values, it instead recruits them into narratives that feel emotionally intuitive and morally self-evident. Each new piece of information then appears merely to confirm conclusions we believe we reached of our own accord.
We have spent decades worrying about who creates propaganda when, all along, we should have been paying far closer attention to who distributes it.
Over the past half-century, regimes such as the Soviet Union, Iran and, more recently, Qatar have invested enormous resources in embedding carefully cultivated narratives within universities, NGOs, media organisations, and activist movements, reshaping the moral framework through which many Western audiences interpret the world.
One of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the modern era has convinced millions (billions?) of people that the real masters of propaganda are “the Zionists.” Perhaps more ironically, the people most convinced that Israel possesses an almost supernatural propaganda machine rarely stop to ask where that belief came from in the first place.
It is a remarkable inversion. The world’s only Jewish state, with approximately 10 million citizens, is somehow imagined to outmanoeuvre the combined information apparatus of the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Qatar, Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Jazeera, countless state-funded media organisations, and decades of coordinated ideological campaigning across universities, NGOs and international institutions.
That is quite an achievement, if true.
What’s more likely is that those most convinced of Israel’s supposedly unrivalled propaganda machine are themselves demonstrating the success of one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in modern history. Many of the assumptions they regard as self-evident were not independently discovered but patiently cultivated through decades of Soviet information warfare, Palestine Liberation Organization diplomacy, Iranian revolutionary propaganda, and Qatari soft-power initiatives before becoming embedded in Western institutions and activist culture.
The bigger lesson is that propaganda no longer succeeds primarily by forcing people to believe falsehoods. It succeeds by curating reality, distributing selective versions of it through trusted institutions, exploiting our psychological instincts, and recruiting ordinary people into the process.
George Orwell feared governments would hide the truth, while Aldous Huxley feared we would become too distracted to seek it. Neil Postman took the argument one step further, warning that we would eventually amuse ourselves into intellectual surrender. Each identified a different vulnerability, but the digital age has fused all three. Truth now competes with algorithms, entertainment, tribal identity, and meticulously cultivated narratives within an information environment no human mind evolved to navigate.
The question is therefore no longer whether propaganda exists. It always has. The question is whether we can still recognise it when it arrives disguised as ordinary information.
Propaganda as used today, in my mind, consists of the "Big Lie" which Dr. Goebbel's used to tell a big enough lie often enough so it becomes it's own version of reality. The entire Jewish population of the Earth is a miniscule amount and somehow they're running the world? Bizarre.
Thank God the Ruach HaKodesh can guide us through the morass.