The Intelligent Voter’s Guide To Propaganda

by Denis Lyons

Disillusioned with politics? Exasperated by the tedious political mudslinging? Unsure about how to vote next time? You are not alone.

Half the voters who backed Labour at the last general election have deserted the party, and the Tories would limp home with a mere 14 seats if a general election were called, according to separate polls disclosed towards the end of 2025. In a snapshot of the rapidly-changing political landscape, Stack Data Strategy’s poll for the Conservatives also indicated that the Lib Dems would win 63 seats, Labour 161 and Reform would romp away with 348.

Perhaps you have analysed all the party manifestos, compared their pros and cons, and assessed the leadership qualities of the political candidates so that, today, your voting intention is crystal clear and your party loyalty unwavering. If so, jolly well done. But, if you are still a member of the pondering masses, fear not – propaganda was created to help people just like you. 

Of course, in polite society, it is not usually referred to as propaganda. It has undergone linguistic bleaching and is now shrouded in more anodyne terms such as engagement farming, policy advocacy, political spin, unverified news, perception management, public relations, talking points, issues management, consensus building, agenda setting, political spin, and many more. But, for those prepared to call a spade a shovel, they are all different forms of propaganda.

However, the intelligent voter might object, we are clearly capable of distinguishing between propaganda and truth. After all, the intelligent voter did not believe either of the propositions in the famous 2016 campaign slogan, "We send the EU £350 million a week. Let's fund our NHS instead." Nor did the intelligent voter believe claims in 2024 that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. But both cases illustrate how quickly and how widely emotive messages spread before the truth catches up with them.

This is exactly how propaganda works. By distilling complex realities into an emotionally-charged story, it reinforces existing beliefs or prejudices and, by repetition through familiar channels, it shapes what people feel, and makes false or distorted ideas seem normal or common sense.

Still unconvinced, the intelligent voter might quote the popular internet meme, “A Russian bot didn’t tell my granny to vote for Brexit!” Possibly not, but to argue that propaganda is not profoundly effective might be slightly naïve. It would be akin to claiming that people are not influenced by advertising which employs many of the same techniques as propaganda. In answer to those who doubt the power of advertising, UK advertisers can point out that, if advertising did not work, they would hardly have spent a record £42.6bn on it last year.

Quantifying the precise impact of Russian and Chinese interference in US and UK elections has proved elusive. But there is strong official and open source evidence of large-scale, state-sponsored Russian and Chinese online campaigns aimed at influencing US and UK public debate, particularly around major elections.

UK leaders are becoming more vocal on this topic. Just before Christmas, Blaise Metreweli, MI6’s recently-appointed, gimlet-eyed boss, underlined the Russian propaganda threat. In her maiden speech, Metreweli highlighted the need for MI6 to extend its use of technology to deal with “Russian information warfare”. In undoubtedly the most articulate recent public statement regarding the dangers of propaganda, Metreweli warned about “Propaganda and influence operations that crack open and exploit fractures within societies.” Metreweli stressed that “... disinformation manipulates our understanding of each other and ourselves,” and that “Information, once a unifying force, is increasingly weaponised.”

It is no coincidence that similar warnings were also issued recently by the Chief of the Defence Staff, and the First Sea Lord.

As long ago as 2021, an extensive Oxford Internet Institute (OII) report also warned about China’s “increasingly assertive global-facing propaganda strategy”. The OII researchers established that “The PRC makes use of both state-controlled media outlets and over 270 diplomatic accounts on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to amplify the PRC’s perspective on global affairs and current events.”

Clint Watts, a US national security analyst, emphasises that state players are not the only source of contemporary propaganda, disinformation and media manipulation. Others include political campaigns and political action committees which use “….unregulated social media platforms to surgically target audiences in support of their candidates and policy agendas”.

One notorious example of this was Cambridge Analytica, the now defunct political consulting firm involved in the 2018 Facebook data scandal. Cambridge Analytica executives described the various dirty tricks, including fake news campaigns, which they employed to influence elections around the world. Injudiciously, the executives described these techniques to undercover Channel 4 News reporters who recorded the conversations In one particularly telling observation, the company’s chief executive says “It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don’t necessarily need to be true as long as they’re believed.”

But what can the intelligent voter do to deal with this tide of misinformation, disinformation and plain old, honest to goodness propaganda? In reality, how well informed is the intelligent voter when interest in news has declined from 48% in 2018 to 42% in 2025, according to Ofcom’s 2025 report on UK news consumption?

The Reuters Institute 2025 Digital News Report even showed that 58% were concerned about their ability to distinguish between what is true and what is false when it comes to online news. But, despite the fact that traditional TV, radio and newspapers news sources are more trusted for accuracy than online or social media, Ofcom found that “More people consume news online than through any other platform.”

Yet another factor could compromise the intelligent voter’s ability, particularly the younger intelligent voter’s ability, to sort reliable news from propaganda. The Reuters report indicated a generational divide. The older (55+) voter is more likely to check the news via websites, newspapers or periodicals, radio or TV, while the younger (under 35) voter will tend to check their social media feeds whose algorithms stream brief, entertaining, attention-grabbing items tailored to  their individual interests. Consequently, the younger voter’s encounter with news is often accidental or incidental, in contrast with the older voter whose consumption of news is intentional.

But, the intelligent voter might say, the gullible young are inevitably easy prey for the manipulative social media algorithms and fake news spewed out by troll farms and bot factories in unpronounceable Russian villages in the Urals. But surely the older voters with their access to respected national newspapers and global TV news networks are immune to all that nonsense?

Possibly, but only "Up to a point, Lord Copper," as Mr Salter in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop might have said. This is largely because of two major related developments.

First, total UK national newspaper print circulation has shrivelled dramatically. It has fallen by about 56% since 2014, according to Media Reform Coalition (MRC) research, and ownership of major newspaper titles has been concentrated in the hands of an increasingly agenda-driven few, enabling them to extend their influence beyond print into the digital news sector.

Three major companies — DMG Media, News UK and Reach —  now control about 90% of UK national newspaper circulation, and they also account for over 40% of the combined reach of the UK’s biggest 50 online news brands.

Secondly, the dramatic concentration of ownership in the digital sector also compromises the intelligent voter’s immunity to social media algorithms. Meta and Google platforms and services “have a higher reach than all ‘traditional’ news publishers and most UK broadcasters except for news outlets owned by the BBC...and ITV.”

The online intermediaries exercise enormous control over news access, with seven of the top fifteen platforms used to access online news in the UK now controlled by Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), Google (YouTube, Google Search, Google News) and X/Twitter. TikTok still lags behind Facebook and Instagram, but is gaining market share rapidly, particularly among the under 24 year olds.

If share of advertising revenues reflects power, then Google and Meta are powerful indeed. Press Gazette estimates indicate that their combined advertising revenues of £26bn accounted not only for over half the record £42.6bn spent on UK advertising in 2024, but it also represented more than ten times the amount spent with all national news brands, magazines, regional titles and radio stations combined.

TV news presents particular challenges for those interested in accurate and impartial information. Struggling to squeeze profits out of their news divisions, TV networks in the US have long sought ways to juice up their news product. One way was to inject a bit of showbiz into news coverage which increasingly became packaged as entertainment.

“I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world… when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result,” Professor Neal Postman, the famous media expert, argued in his seminal 1984 book "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business."

This gave new impetus to the ‘if it bleeds it leads’ criterion for news selection and paved the way for cable channels like Fox and MSNBC to shape the news to meet specific political preferences. The television landscape in the UK is very different from that in the US, and the political tone is less strident, but GB News has taken steps in a similar direction, and there is no shortage of political activist video bloggers.

Despite the steady migration from traditional news providers to online sources, the BBC still commands the largest cross-platform news reach, with 67% of all UK adults - ahead of Meta’s 39% and Google’s 34%.

The BBC also continues to be a target-rich institution, a favourite punchbag, and is frequently charged with political bias in its news reporting. The fact that criticisms come from both left and right does not in itself prove impartiality, but it might suggest that the BBC is doing something right. Indeed, some in the news sector might argue that accuracy, not bias, is a bigger problem for the BBC, particularly in its television news coverage.

Ironically, and sadly, the BBC’s biggest recent editorial brouhaha was triggered not by bias, but by a spectacular breach of the most basic journalistic editing principles. The BBC acknowledged that an edited version of Donald Trump’s 2021 Ellipse speech aired in a BBC Panorama documentary had given a “mistaken impression" – one which prompted Donald Trump to sue the BBC for $10 billion in damages.

Is this a climate in which Thomas Jefferson might still be able to write, as he did in 1787, that given a choice between “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter”? Possibly not, given that that the current media landscape provides such a rich terrain for exploitation by propagandists.

Two major influences on the development of modern propaganda were Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud. Lippmann argued that propaganda is inevitable because the public is not capable of independently understanding complex political issues and therefore opinions need to be shaped by a knowledgeable elite.

Bernays viewed propaganda as a positive means of achieving an efficient democracy by enabling an elite class of experts to manage information for the public. He devised practical ways to achieve this, became known as the “father of modern public relations”, and was also one of the key architects of modern psychologically-driven advertising and brand building. Bernays’ propaganda, PR and advertising techniques were highly successful and, in his autobiography, Bernays even describes how he was told that Goebbels, “...was using my book ‘Crystallizing Public Opinion’ as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany.”

The basic principles involved in manipulating information for the mass market are as valid today as they were a hundred years ago when Lippmann and Bernays documented them. One enormous difference is the AI-infused social media phenomenon which has revolutionised partisan messaging. The other significant difference is that partisan messaging has been democratised. The major media, government and state players have always been able to massage their messaging, both directly and through proxies - but now anyone with an iPhone and a point of view can be a propagandist.

Every propagandist’s dream is of course for the public to mistake ignorance for knowledge. Referring specifically to TV news, Neal Postman wrote “...“we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?” If Postman’s verdict was sobering forty years ago, how much more disturbing would his verdict be on today’s even less nutritious diet of infotainment?

So what does the intelligent voter do to survive on this increasingly suspect news diet? Blaise Metreweli’s contemporary prescription is spot on: “Let’s all check sources, consider evidence, and be alive to those algorithms that trigger intense reactions, like fear.”

In 1951, when Hannah Arendt offered this alarmingly accurate analysis of propaganda in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, could she possibly have known quite how prescient it might also prove to be?

“Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

The intelligent voter’s most effective strategy is to help ensure that apathy, cynicism, and uninterest do not lead one day to a similarly chilling assessment of our present era.