(A series in which I ramble some personal perspective on ICYDAK's "30 Proven Tactics to Resist Authoritarianism in Daily Life," because most of this stuff is just default daily life to me.)
ICYDAK: 30 Proven Tactics to Resist Authoritarianism in Everyday Life
#1: know your rights
#2: secure your communications
#3: diversify your news sources
#4: develop financial independence
Every authoritarian movement uses the same tactics. Learn to recognize fear-mongering, scapegoating, and disinformation.
"Propaganda" is a broad subject, with a lot of different tactics at its disposal. Recognizing it is a skill. Even people who do it professionally don't always catch every form of it. Books can and have been written on the subject of identifying propaganda when one sees it.
But I don't want to write a book. I want to write a blog post. So if you want a one-stop propaganda/psychological warfare detector, here is the broadest possible net I can think to cast:
It's propaganda if it tries to tell you how to feel instead of what happened.
This definition does not cover all forms of propaganda or psychological warfare. But it covers the majority. That's because these methods rely on short-circuiting your ability to apply logic, rationality, or common sense to a topic. And there's no faster way to end-run human higher brain functions than to light up the emotional centers - or better yet, the survival system.
Fearmongering/scaremongering hijacks people's fear for the propagandist's benefit. It convinces you there's some immediate threat, against which you should react however the propagandist tells you to react.
Fearmongering works because it lights up the brain's fight-or-flight response. In survival mode, your critical thinking faculties get shut down. If your brain's regions are a bunch of offices, the breaker to the "critical thinking" department has been flipped.
This system works great when you're faced with an actual threat. If a tiger is stalking you, you don't need to analyze its stripes. You need to either run or fight. Conserving your energy to fight or flee by withdrawing it from the critical thinking bits of the brain is EXACTLY the right strategy.
The problem is that your survival brain is built for only one thing: survival. It doesn't do critical thinking. So it can't tell the difference between a threat you can actually fight or run from (like a tiger) versus one that is made up in a story to convince you to take certain actions (like "illegal aliens overrunning our borders").
To respond to fearmongering, ask:
Scapegoating, or "playing the blame game," singles out an entire group of people and accuses them of the worst possible behavior (maybe) displayed by one or two of them. If none of them happen to the bad things? This doesn't matter - scapegoating will happily accuse them of doing it anyway, but in secret! They're so sneaky we can't even catch them doing [insert evil thing here]!
Scapegoating usually contains a fair amount of projection. If you see a person/group routinely accusing some other person/group of doing a Bad Thing, ask yourself whether the second group is actually at fault...or the first group is just trying to cover something up. Sometimes you won't find any evidence of wrongdoing on either side. Sometimes you'll find one side is acting badly. Sometimes both sides are.
The goal of scapegoating is to create a mob mentality - "us against them," where "them" are whatever group the propagandist wants you to target for the propagandist's ends. Again, your critical thinking gets hijacked by emotions for someone else's benefit.
Questions to ask when a person/message starts accusing another person or group of bad attitudes or actions:
Disinformation intentionally misstates the facts in order to mislead an audience - to get them to believe what the propagandist wants them to think. It's thus very useful for both scapegoating and fearmongering.
A lot of resources on identifying propaganda and "fake news" distinguish between misinformation and disinformation. Both are misstated facts, but misinformation is usually shared in good faith - like when your auntie shares a Facebook post that is factually wrong, but she was trying to help. Disinformation is when your auntie shares a Facebook post whose facts she KNOWS are wrong but she wants to make someone angry or get them on her side.
The difference doesn't matter much in practice, tbh. Sure, you'll be nicer to your auntie if you know she was acting in good faith. But the impact of the false information is often the same.
Some disinformation is obvious, because it's factually impossible. My favorite current example is President Trump's State of the Union claim that his TrumpRx website has dropped the prices of prescription drugs by 300 or 400 percent. If true, this would mean TrumpRx PAYS YOU 2-3 times the price of the drug whenever you fill a prescription through the website. And if THAT were true, Trump would have found someone to come to the SOTU who actually GOT PAID to take their meds - but the best he could find was a woman whose fertility meds dropped to $500 via TrumpRx from about $3,500 (per Trump's speech). That's a drop of about 85 percent, which is still pretty good, but it's not 300 percent.
Other disinformation is harder to spot. To catch it all, you'd have to be an expert in everything - which is, frankly, just not possible.
When you hear something presented as a fact:
Most psychological warfare tactics, like the three above, use fear. Fear is the most effective at shutting down the critical reasoning areas of our brains. Yet fear isn't the only tool at a propagandist's disposal. In fact, it's not always the favorite tool.
Any emotion can be used to push you to the conclusion someone else wants you to reach, rather than the conclusion you'd reach through your own reasoning. Remember when we were all encouraged to vote for George W. Bush because "you can have a beer with this guy"? That's a non-fear emotion (friendship, camaraderie, familiarity) used to short-circuit critical thinking (like "what are his political positions? what does he promise to do if elected? where is his campaign money coming from? what's on his running mate's CV?")
So: If something seems to be trying to make you feel something, ask what. Then ask what you'd need to know to make a decision NOT based on feelings. Then find it out.
Yeah, this is hard. Especially when emotions are running high - as they definitely are right now, politically and otherwise. But relying on those emotions is exactly what propagandists want you to do. You don't have to do what they want.
The Kid Should See This: What is propaganda and how can you spot it?
Cornell University Library: evaluating the news
Kenwood News: News literacy - be aware of propaganda
Mind Over Media: Recognizing propaganda
Wikipedia: fearmongering/scaremongering
Wikipedia: Scapegoating
APA: misinformation and disinformation
--