or propaganda. Propaganda is a wide term; it doesn't simply mean warning the people of the existence of an evil?tuberculosis in this instance?and working them up into a state of panic, nor, on the other hand, telling them^that they simply have to do is this or that, and all will be well?with them and their families at least. It is much more comprehensive than this. Unfortunately, during the las...

The Water Environment Federation's elaborate effort to rename sewage sludge as "biosolids" is an example in practice of the "propaganda model" of communications, which sees its task as indoctrinating target audiences with ideas favorable to the interests of the communicators. The propaganda model assumes that members of the public are irrational and focuses therefore on symbolic and emotional a...

Influencing the public attitude towards certain topics had become one of the strongest weapons in today’s information warfare. The ability to recognize a presence of propaganda in newspaper texts is thus a treasured phenomenon, which is not directly transferable to algorithmic analysis. In the current paper, we present the first steps of the project aiming at detection and recognition of select...

The evolution of opinions in a population of individuals who constantly interact with a common source of user-generated content (i.e. the internet) and are also subject to propaganda is analyzed using computer simulations. The model is based on the bounded confidence approach. In the absence of propaganda, computer simulations show that the online population as a whole is either fragmented, pol...

Does propaganda reduce the probability of popular protest in Africa’s contemporary autocracies? To answer this question, we draw on an original dataset of state-run newspapers from 21 African countries, encompassing two languages and roughly 600,000 articles. We find that propaganda diminishes the probability of protest, and that its effects persist over time. By increasing the level of pro-reg...

Research on parochial altruism demonstrated that hostility toward out-groups (parochialism) represents the dark side of the willingness to benefit one's in-group even at own costs (altruism). Parochial aggression thereby emerged mainly under conditions of threat. Extremist propaganda videos, for instance by right-wing extremists, try to capitalize on parochial altruistic mechanism by telling re...