If you have spent any time on social media over the past decade, you have almost certainly spoken to at least one synthetic person without realizing it. Probably more than one. Platforms purge fake accounts by the hundreds of thousands, and in 2024 researchers exposed coordinated influence operations that used AI chatbots to churn out posts, comments, and fake personas in several languages at once.
This is what propaganda looks like now. You picture propaganda as kitschy, cartoonish posters from the 1940s, and once upon a time you would have been right. Modern propaganda is almost entirely digital, and nowhere near as easy to spot.
“The misinformation crisis is a symptom of the enormously significant ways that the internet has changed our information ecosystem, which I don’t think anybody, least of all governments and traditional media, has fully got to grips with.” Al Baker, then Managing Editor at Logically
Dictators use bots to stifle uprisings. Political candidates use bots to promote their platforms. Civil rights advocates use bots to schedule protests and share information. That new startup has bots to raise its brand profile, and if you have ever scheduled an automated post, you have used one, too. Like most technology, bots are not malevolent by nature. How they are used, however, is another matter entirely.
This article examines the methods and origins of modern propaganda, and what has been done to combat it.
- Fake news and propaganda are the same beast
- Modern propaganda is not doing anything new
- Meet the AI generating synthetic content
- Spotting modern propaganda today
Onward, we go:
Fake news and propaganda are the same beast
The short version: no, there is not much of a difference. The long version is, well. Long.
People have been trying to influence each other’s opinions for thousands of years, and, undoubtedly, they will keep manipulating each other for many thousands more. As long as there are commodities and consumers, there will be propaganda.
“War is peace
freedom is slavery
ignorance is strength”
George Orwell, 1984
Fake news. Clickbait. Disinformation. Misinformation. Deepfakes. Propaganda. What does it all really mean, and how do you know which one you are dealing with?
To answer that, let’s rewind and look at how modern propaganda got its start.
A brief history of propaganda
In the Kermanshah Province of Iran, west of Tehran, lies the small village of Behistun. Just outside the village sits Mount Behistun, and one of the most important historical sites in the world: the Behistun Inscription.
“I am Darius, the great king, king of kings, the king of Persia, the king of countries, the son of Hystaspes, the grandson of Arsames, the Achaemenid.” King Darius I the Great, approximately 520 BCE
The inscription runs an impressive 515 lines in the original Persian cuneiform, just shy of 10 A4 pages once translated to English.
What does an ancient Persian king have to do with modern propaganda?
The Behistun Inscription matters for two reasons. First, because the monument is multilingual, it serves as the equivalent of the Rosetta Stone for cuneiform. It is also, according to many historians, one of the earliest known examples of propaganda.
The word “propaganda” evokes certain feelings and ideas in all of us. You may think of regimes like North Korea or the Third Reich. Perhaps your mind leans more towards organizations like Hydra and Vought. Maybe you guiltily think of the copy you wrote this morning to promote the latest app to hit the store. (Don’t forget to leave a review! Reposts please!)
Maybe it’s my age, but I think of George Orwell and 1984.
Lately, that distinctive, bold red and black eye seems even more pernicious than when I first read the book as a precocious teenager excited by the idea of rebelling against state (read: parental) oppression.
We are all rebels at 16, but propaganda has not always been propaganda.
I have already mentioned King Darius I. He was not the only figure from the ancient world to use propaganda, though. Themistocles (Greece, 480 BCE) used it to defeat Xerxes. Alexander the Great (Macedonia, 356 to 323 BCE) put his face on coins, monuments, statues, and pretty much anything else. Julius Caesar (Rome, 100 to 44 BCE) was considered an expert propagandist, as were many other Roman writers.
The first use of the word, however, does not arrive until 1718: a shortened version of “Congregatio de Propaganda Fide” (congregation for propagating the faith), a committee of Catholic cardinals set up to oversee foreign missions.
The modern definition of propaganda, material to persuade or advance a cause, only originates around 1920, during the first world war. Even then, propaganda was more neutral than negative. Propaganda in the early 20th century was most often used to rally and unite the populace in times of war.
Posters urged children to save their quarters for stamps, food to be rationed, and liberty bonds to be bought in support of the war effort. And, of course, we all know Uncle Sam’s iconic portrait some 100 years later.
That is not to say those posters never served a political agenda, or that they never blatantly appealed to racial stereotypes and emotive responses to further those agendas.
Okay. War propaganda, not the greatest example. Let’s talk about cookies.
Oreo once posted a series of tweets alongside PFLAG using Oreos to depict some of the flags of the LGBTQ+ community for National Coming Out Day, following up the next day with #ProudParent to enter a giveaway for the featured rainbow cookies.
Is this a corporation jumping on the bandwagon of social responsibility to increase profits? Maybe.
Is it harmful? Not really. Who doesn’t love cookies?
Is it promoting a particular agenda? Obviously.
Is it modern propaganda? Absolutely.
That single campaign performed three different functions as propaganda:
- It says Oreo promotes inclusivity, and if you promote inclusivity too, buy their cookies.
- It tells the LGBTQ+ community that Oreo supports them, so they should buy more cookies, too.
- It is a run of linked tweets prominently featuring the product, racking up tens of thousands of retweets and likes, so, buy the cookies already.
Not everyone reacted positively, and cynicism aside, Oreo has stayed consistent with this campaign. The point is that thousands of people engaged with the Oreo brand because of one tweet.
Propaganda is everywhere, but don’t freak out. Like the bots, modern propaganda is not inherently nefarious. How it is used, however, is a huge problem, particularly in the digital age, where anyone with an internet connection and a clever idea can go viral with the right amount of effort.
But surely, if we are aware of the effect, it won’t really work, right?
Wrong.
There are a number of reasons we fall for fake news and propaganda. Most significantly, all propaganda, whether from a political campaign, a cookie company, or the high school cheerleading team, is specifically designed to make you react.
So how does this whole propaganda thing actually work?
Modern propaganda is not doing anything new
In 1937, the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA) created a list of seven tactics used in propaganda. The IPA closed in 1942, unable to remain impartial during the second world war, but many still use its list as a base. Others have expanded it, cataloging sometimes up to 50 different propaganda tactics.
What makes modern propaganda effective, though, is really very simple: it makes you feel.
It is not a matter of feeling happy or sad. Propaganda targets things like fear, security, identity, and pride. It taps into those deeply held, visceral emotions you cannot quite describe, all those biases you do not even know you have, and it exploits them.
Let’s talk about earworms. You know, that song you heard for five seconds while you popped into a shop, but five days later the chorus is still on repeat in your head?
Propaganda is the earworm.
Researchers claim earworms need five components to work: surprise, predictability, rhythmic repetition, melodic potency, and receptiveness.
(You’re welcome.)
The difference between the propaganda of last century and the modern iteration is volume. Television, YouTube, radio, social media, blogs, apps, we consume ridiculous amounts of information every day. Our brains, however, can only take in so much. The more we consume, the harder it is to process; the harder it is to process, the less receptive we are.
The human brain uses an immense amount of energy, so it cuts corners. These cognitive shortcuts essentially mean that the easier something is to process, through rhyming, legibility, or repetition, the more we like it. The more positive we feel about a thought, the more we believe it.
With what is known as “information pollution” (fake news) pumped into our daily feeds nonstop, combined with the fact that we find ourselves outside our circle of competence more and more, deciding what is true and what is not becomes nearly impossible.
This is called the Illusory Truth Effect. It means that no matter how well informed, intelligent, or discriminating we are, we are all likely to believe something that is not true at some point. That viral screenshot of the outrageous thing a public figure supposedly said? More often than you would think, it never happened.
What fake news really means
Fake news does what it says on the tin: it is untrue information spread under the guise of factual news.
The origin of the term is contentious. It has gained traction since 2016 through news and media outlets, and several researchers, journalists, and the occasional world leader claim to have coined it, though, fittingly, no one can back that up with any evidence.
While the phrase “fake news” may or may not have been in use as far back as the 19th century, everyone agrees that yellow journalism very much was.
In 1883, Joseph Pulitzer (yes, that Pulitzer) built the largest newspaper circulation in the US using sensationalism, scandal-mongering, and eye-catching headlines with the sole purpose of enticing readers.
A few years later, William Randolph Hearst arrived on the scene. The intense rivalry over who could publish the most lurid and outlandish reporting quickly became known as yellow journalism. It changed American journalism forever. We do not call it yellow journalism anymore, but modern propaganda still uses the same tools today: banner headlines, color comics, illustrations, and pretty much all of the internet.
With so much misinformation and disinformation circulating, “fake news” seems like a fitting phrase to use. Except it is not that simple. In a somewhat ironic turn, the term “fake news” has become propaganda itself.
While some still use “fake news” to refer solely to false news stories, others use it as a catch-all for any disinformation being pushed on the public. Still others wield it as an accusation of media bias, a way to discredit anyone who disagrees with them. Even respectable mainstays of legitimate journalism have been tagged as “fake news.”
This is where the term becomes genuinely dangerous. How many times have you been on X, scanned an article quickly, and hit repost only to learn it was satire or parody? How many times have you seen a post and thought, this cannot be true, only to learn later that it very much was?
We live in, let’s face it, a very bizarre moment in history. The drive for more, better, faster connectivity is spreading information and discourse like never before. Stories are published, then revised, then updated, then sometimes removed entirely, minute by minute. We read our news on X, Facebook, and YouTube, commuting to work, walking down the street, grabbing a sandwich between meetings.
Information is spreading faster and faster, and we are giving it less and less critical attention. So what is the solution?
Meet the AI generating synthetic content
It is no secret that artificial intelligence is used to create and spread fake news, or, more precisely, synthetic content. Not all AI is created equal, though, and for the most part the AI at work on your social feed is nowhere near the likes of Data or HAL.
Plenty of it is still what gets called weak AI: narrow, task-specific, and, frankly, not that bright. Over a short exchange a bot can be hard to pick out; over time, it usually gives itself away. But since AI is being used to create fake news, people started asking the obvious question: could AI also be used to detect it?
The generative wave
The generative wave changed the math. When OpenAI built GPT-3, the company called the model too dangerous to release and kept it behind a waitlist. A few years later, that caution looks quaint. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in about two months, comparable large language models from Anthropic, Google, and Meta are free and fast, and the current generation writes text that is often indistinguishable from a human. AI is woven into everyday work now, from drafting emails to summarizing reports, and even processing documents end to end. The same capability that helps you write faster helps a propagandist flood a feed.
Bigger models did not buy reliability, though. As cognitive scientist Gary Marcus warned back when GPT-3 launched, fluency is not the same as understanding:
“Although its output is grammatical, and even impressively idiomatic, its comprehension of the world is often seriously off, which means you can never really trust what it says.” Gary Marcus
That gap between sounding right and being right is exactly what makes these models such effective engines of plausible nonsense.
Deepfakes, voice clones, and synthetic media
Text was only the beginning. The same tools now generate voice, images, and video. In 2023, an AI-cloned audio clip of a Slovak party leader appeared to discuss rigging the vote, spreading in the media silence just before the country’s election. In January 2024, an AI robocall impersonating President Biden told New Hampshire voters to stay home on primary day. Similar audio fakes surfaced around elections in Pakistan and Bangladesh the same year.
Deepfakes are cheap, convincing, and increasingly ordinary. The old giveaways, six-fingered hands and waxy skin, fade with every model release, and the burden of doubt shifts onto the viewer.
Can AI catch what AI makes?
So far, not reliably. OpenAI quietly retired its own AI-text classifier in 2023 after it flagged only a fraction of AI writing correctly and routinely misfired on real human authors, hitting non-native English speakers hardest. Detectors remain a coin toss, and betting your judgment entirely on one is its own kind of gullibility.
The researchers building detection tools are the first to say the machines are not meant to work alone. As one AI lab put it, the point of these systems “isn’t designed to replace people, but to help them fact-check faster and more reliably.” We cannot become complacent, assuming the machines will do all the work for us when it comes to modern propaganda. As individuals, we have a responsibility to be more discerning about the information we interact with.
Spotting modern propaganda today
“If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.” President Obama, 2016
How do you decide what is true and what is not? How do you know whether the latest viral statistic is accurate or cherry-picked? With so many headlines, sources, and conflicting statements coming at you, it can be hard to decide who to listen to.
Fortunately, you are not alone. Here are eight simple tactics you can use to get better at spotting modern propaganda:
- Consider the source. Where is the story coming from? Check out the site, its mission, and its contact info. Look at what else it has published. Ask yourself: is this site reliable?
- Read beyond. Don’t just read the headline. Headlines are designed to get clicks. There are guides and formulas ad infinitum on how to entice readers with clickable headlines. I used one for the title of this post. The point is: get the whole story.
- Check the author. Like the site, is the author credible? Is the author even real? Check them out. What else have they written? Who have they written for? What are their credentials?
- Supporting sources. Click the links to those sources. Do they support what the author is saying, or have they been misconstrued? Are those sources credible themselves?
- Check the date. Old news gets reposted as new information all the time, especially on social media. A clip from years ago gets edited to fit the narrative of a current issue, or a statement about one topic gets repurposed to make the speaker look a certain way. Make sure your information is as up to date and relevant as possible.
- Is it parody? Satire and parody get mistaken for real news constantly. Most of these sites make it clear they are not serious, but a hastily reposted link without verification can make a joke look like a fact. If something sounds too outlandish (I know, it can be hard to tell these days), do some research to make sure.
- Check your bias. It’s okay. We all have them. It is how we understand the world. The important thing is to be aware of them. Are your beliefs affecting your judgment? If you read a negative story about a politician you like, are you more incredulous than you would be about a politician you disagree with?
- Ask the experts. This is probably the most important thing you can do. Our devices overload us with information, but they also let us research quickly. With very little effort, you can reach facts and ideas from experts in almost any field.
Combine those eight tactics with the tools below and you will be much better equipped to tell fact from fiction.
Fact-checking tools that still hold up
NewsGuard rates the reliability of news sites and, increasingly, audits what AI chatbots repeat. Its browser extension flags whether a site is trustworthy and lets you open a “Nutrition Label” covering ownership, funding, credibility, and history, everything you need to decide if a source is reliable. In 2025 its analysts found that leading AI models repeated false claims roughly a third of the time, which tells you how much of the modern information supply is worth double-checking.
The platforms have shifted too. X now leans on Community Notes, crowd-sourced context stapled onto misleading posts, and in early 2025 Meta ended its US third-party fact-checking program to copy the model. Notes can slow a lie down, but coverage is thin and they often land after a post has already gone viral.
What happened to the anti-misinformation apps
The last wave of consumer fact-checking apps mostly did not survive. Logically, the AI-and-human fact-checking app whose managing editor Al Baker is quoted above, wound its consumer product down; the company went into administration in 2025, and its technology now lives on in government-facing intelligence work. Grover, a research model built to sniff out machine-written news, is offline. our.news is gone.
Baker’s advice still lands, though. Beyond asking whether something is true, ask why it is being said:
“Think about the way politicians will so often respond to an awkward question by changing the subject: that’s not a lie, but there’s certainly something dishonest about it. […] Ask yourself, is this something that a person would tell me who wanted me to understand the issue?”
The lesson is not that the tools failed so much as that spotting propaganda was never something you could fully outsource to an app.
Fact-checking sites worth bookmarking
Beyond apps, there are still fact-checking websites whose whole mission is to verify and debunk claims. Bookmark a few if you want to check whether the story your aunt’s cousin’s neighbor’s niece posted on Facebook is true, or just another case of modern propaganda.
- Media Bias/Fact Check: rates news media by factual accuracy and political bias. Click through different leanings (left, left-center, right, and so on) for a list of outlets, or search a specific publication.
- FactCheck.org: funded by the Annenberg Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania, it describes itself as an advocate that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in US politics.
- Snopes: started out investigating urban legends and hoaxes and has since grown into one of the largest investigative reporting and fact-checking sites out there.
“This isn’t a problem we can talk about solving yet, not until there is a more general realization that the information crisis is a feature of our new media ecosystem, and not of passing political circumstances.” Al Baker
How do you feel about AI being used to detect propaganda, rather than spread it? Is the risk too high that the same technology will keep being turned the other way? Let us know what you think.