Fake News, Propaganda & Manipulation

TL;DR

• Mental security is the third pillar of information security. Digital security protects your accounts. Physical security protects your home. Mental security protects what you think — and what your children will be taught to think.
• Fake news, propaganda, hate speech, trolling, conspiracy theories — these are not random noise. They are tools, and they have a purpose: to take your decision out of your hands while leaving you feeling like you decided.
• The two most common goals today: dividing groups so they cannot stand together, and stealing your power to decide for yourself — your vote, your money, your loyalty, your judgment.
• History tells us where this ends. None of the great catastrophes of the last hundred years began with a war. They began with a captured information environment.
• The defense isn't a fact-checker. It's a small habit: when you feel certain — especially in politics, social conflict, or morality — ask yourself, how did I come to believe this? Apply that question most strictly to the beliefs you feel most strongly about. Those are the ones with the most leverage on your life.

What it is

You probably already think about two kinds of security.

Digital — passwords, two-factor codes, backups, the lock on your phone. Physical — the lock on your door, a camera on the porch, knowing how to walk home safely at night.

There is a third kind, less talked about, that has become just as important. Mental security. The security of what's in your head — your beliefs, your assumptions, your sense of who the enemy is, your sense of who you can trust.

We treat this as part of information security — not medicine. This isn't about your mood or your therapist. It's about whether the information feeding your decisions — how you vote, what you teach your children, who you trust, who you suspect — is still your own. If a small group of people, somewhere, can quietly shape that information, then a small group of people, somewhere, is quietly shaping your life.

Why call it security? Because someone benefits when you believe a specific thing.

• A politician benefits if you believe their opponent is corrupt.
• A foreign government benefits if you believe your own neighbours are dangerous.
• A social platform benefits if you stay outraged and keep scrolling.
• A wealthy donor benefits if you vote for the party that will tax them less.
• A movement benefits if you feel certain enough to act — and never quite certain enough to stop and ask why.

Fake news, propaganda, trolling, hate speech, racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, conspiracy theories — these aren't accidents. They are tools. They have been used for centuries. The new part is the speed, the personalization, and the fact that anyone with a phone and a budget can reach millions of people by Friday.

History tells us what happens

Mass mental manipulation is not a modern problem. The internet is just a faster delivery system for one of the oldest political weapons.

Nazi Germany (1933–1945). Joseph Goebbels ran a state ministry dedicated to propaganda. Radio, film, posters, schoolbooks — every channel coordinated, every day. Jews, Roma, disabled people, political opponents were systematically dehumanized through years of repetition until ordinary citizens accepted the persecution of their neighbours. The propaganda came first. The Holocaust came after.

Stalin's Soviet Union. Show trials, mass purges, an engineered famine in Ukraine — the Holodomor — that killed millions, paired with an information machine that denied it was happening or blamed the victims for it. The state newspaper was called Pravda: "Truth." Citizens who openly doubted disappeared.

Imperial Japan (1930s–1945). A coordinated state campaign turned ordinary national pride into fanatical devotion to the Emperor as a divine being. That fanaticism enabled the Rape of Nanking, the comfort-women system, and atrocities across occupied Asia.

The pattern is the same every time, and it never starts with violence.

1. The information environment is captured. Newspapers, then radio, then film, now social media.
2. A designated enemy is repeated, again and again, until ordinary people accept what their grandparents would have refused.
3. Then violence becomes possible — sometimes against people inside the country, sometimes against neighbours, sometimes both.

By the end of the Second World War, around sixty million people were dead. The fighting was the last act. The first act was decades of manipulated information — on every side.

The reason we put this card inside information security is that without secure information, none of the other securities hold. A society that has lost its mental security cannot protect anything else — not its borders, not its institutions, not its children.

The pattern today

The tools are now cheaper, faster, and personal. The purposes have not changed. We will not name countries, parties, billionaires, or platforms here — names change every few years, and the moment we name one, half our readers stop listening. The pattern is what matters. Once you see it, you can apply it to whatever you see in front of you, with whatever names are current.

Dividing what could otherwise stand together

A united group is hard to push around. A divided one — where people inside it distrust each other more than they distrust anyone outside — is easy to push around. The same logic that once applied between empires now applies between political parties, religions, regions, generations, even neighbours on the same street.

If a foreign power, a political movement, or a commercial interest wants to weaken a country, the cheapest route is not an invasion. It is to amplify whatever already divides the people inside that country — and to invent new divisions where the old ones have started to heal. A few thousand fake accounts, a coordinated batch of paid posts, a single viral lie repeated by people who already trust each other — and within a year, neighbours who would have shared a coffee five years ago no longer speak.

You do not need someone to tell you who is doing this to your country. You only need to recognise the pattern when you see it: a feeling of "us against them" arriving without you having met any of "them," and growing stronger the more time you spend on your phone.

Stealing your power to decide for yourself

The second pattern is older than democracy itself and travels under many names: vote-buying, demagoguery, "manufacturing consent," astroturfing, influence operations. Underneath the names, it is one thing — someone wants you to choose what they would have chosen for you, while still feeling like the choice was yours.

Modern democracies allow private individuals and groups to buy media at scale — newspapers, television stations, social platforms, podcast networks, influencer networks. When the owner of a platform holds strong political and economic preferences, the platform's content rules, its recommendation algorithm, and what it chooses to amplify or quietly hide can tilt — by design or by drift — in one direction.

The mechanism is simple. Get a political party into power that taxes you less, regulates you less, prosecutes you less. The investment in shaping public opinion pays itself back in policy. The same is true on every side of the political spectrum. It is not a problem of one party. It is a problem of concentrated influence over what people see and hear.

This is what is meant, here, by stealing your vote. The vote was technically yours — you went to the polling station, you ticked the box. But the choice was rehearsed for you, every day, for years, by people whose interests do not match yours.

When you feel a strong political or social certainty after spending a lot of time on one particular platform, one particular news source, or one particular set of influencers, ask yourself:

• Who owns this?
• What would they gain if I believe what I am currently inclined to believe?
• Have I ever spent serious time with the opposite view, told well, by someone who holds it in good faith?

You may decide the people behind the platform have no real influence over you. You may decide they do. Either way, you have asked the question. That is mental security.

The skill: doubt yourself first

If you feel 100% certain about something — especially something political, social, or moral — slow down.

Ask yourself, honestly:

How did I come to believe this?

Walk back the path. Did you read it somewhere — where? Did you hear it from family? Did you piece it together from your own life? Did you arrive at it gradually over years, or all at once after one strong piece of content shared by someone you trust?

Then ask the second question:

What evidence would change my mind?

If the honest answer is "nothing would change my mind" — notice that. A belief that no evidence could move isn't a conclusion. It's an attachment. We all have attachments — there's no shame in that. But it matters that you can tell the difference between I believe this because of the following facts and I believe this because I have always believed it.

This isn't about becoming wishy-washy or refusing to have opinions. Strong opinions, held with humility, are fine and often necessary. The problem isn't having an opinion. The problem is mistaking certainty for proof.

Most fake news works because the reader is already certain. The lie just lands in the place where the doubt should have been.

How to seek other opinions

This is the harder part, and the more important one. We naturally read and watch what already confirms us. Algorithms make this worse — they show you more of what already moved you, because that keeps you on the platform.

1. Find one source you trust that disagrees with you. Not a screaming social media account — a calm, written source from people who hold the opposite view in good faith. Read it regularly. You don't have to agree. You have to understand.
2. Ask "who benefits if I believe this?" — and apply the question to your own side too. The question is not only for the other team. Most people apply skepticism outward only. That's not skepticism. That's loyalty.
3. Talk to a real person, in person, who lives differently from you. A neighbour. An older relative. A coworker from a different country. A friend who voted the other way. Listen more than you talk.
4. Watch how you feel when someone disagrees with you. Anger and certainty often arrive together. That's a signal — not necessarily that you're wrong, but that in this moment you're not thinking, you're defending. Recognise it. Step back. Come back later if it still matters.
5. Notice when you call someone an "idiot" or "evil." That language is a shortcut your mind takes to skip the work of understanding. Sometimes people really are acting in bad faith. Most of the time, they aren't — they just live in a different information world from you.

What NOT to do

• Don't pretend you have no views. Pretending to be neutral is its own kind of manipulation. Have views. Just know where they came from.
• Don't try to "win" arguments online. Nobody changes their mind in a comment section. Real change happens slowly, in long, quiet, in-person conversations between people who trust each other.
• Don't write off everyone who disagrees with you as a victim of propaganda. That's exactly the certainty we are warning against. Maybe they have access to information you don't. Maybe they're seeing something you aren't.
• Don't moralize. When you teach others — especially children — how to think about this, show them the habit of doubting yourself, out loud. Habits are learned by example, not by lecture.
• Don't assume you are immune. "I see through all that" is the most useful belief a manipulator can install in a target. The people most certain they cannot be manipulated are often the easiest to manipulate.

Where to learn more

We won't tell you which side is right, and we won't hand you a list of "approved" voices. We will give you a few starting points, and the tools to find your own.

Independent fact-checkers

These are international, non-governmental organisations whose job is to verify or refute specific claims circulating in the news and on social media. None is perfect. Use at least two, from different countries, when something matters.

• International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) — an umbrella body that certifies independent fact-checkers in more than seventy countries. Their Code of Principles requires non-partisanship, transparency of sources, transparency of funding, and a public corrections policy. Browse the signatories at ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org and pick a few from your own region and from a region you don't know.
• Snopes (snopes.com) — long-running, covers viral claims globally in plain language.
• FactCheck.org — university-housed (Annenberg Public Policy Center), focused on political claims.
• Reuters Fact Check and AFP Fact Check — major news agencies with global desks; both publish in several languages.
• Bellingcat (bellingcat.com) — open-source investigative collective, especially strong on conflict, propaganda, and state-actor campaigns.
• Full Fact (UK), Maldita.es (Spain), Pagella Politica (Italy), Correctiv (Germany), Africa Check, Boom (India), Aos Fatos (Brazil) — regional IFCN signatories worth knowing if you read in their languages.

None of these are above criticism. All of them have made mistakes. The point is not "trust them more than your own judgment" — the point is "compare them with your judgment, and notice when they disagree."

Books worth reading

Names and platforms change quickly. Books that have lasted decades — or that the field still recognises a few years after publication — tend to outlast partisan politics. We've split the list in two: foundational older texts that examine manipulation across many regimes, and more recent work focused specifically on fake news, online extremism, and the modern information environment.

We've chosen examples that approach manipulation from more than one angle — different countries, different political traditions, different decades — because the technique is the same regardless of who is using it.

Foundational (pre-2000)

• Edward Bernays — Propaganda (1928). The founding text of modern public relations. Bernays was Sigmund Freud's nephew and one of the early architects of "engineering consent." He wrote this book unapologetically — explaining how to manufacture public opinion. Read it as the manual the manipulators read.
• Aldous Huxley — Brave New World (1932). Fiction. A society pacified not by force but by pleasure, distraction, and engineered comfort.
• Victor Klemperer — The Language of the Third Reich (LTI) (1947, English 2000). A Jewish philologist in Nazi Germany documenting how the regime corrupted everyday German vocabulary, year by year. The closest you can get to watching mental security collapse in real time.
• George Orwell — 1984 (1949). Fiction. The opposite vision to Huxley: a society held in place by surveillance, fear, and rewriting of the past.
• Hannah Arendt — The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). The classic analysis of how Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union arose from similar manipulations of mass society. Difficult — worth the effort.
• Eric Hoffer — The True Believer (1951). On why mass movements attract people. Written by a longshoreman, not an academic — readable and uncomfortable for every political camp.
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — The Gulag Archipelago (1973). The Soviet system from the inside, written by someone who survived it.
• Robert Cialdini — Influence (1984). The psychology of persuasion. How the same six levers work whether the persuader is selling soap, candidates, or hatred.
• Carl Sagan — The Demon-Haunted World (1995). On critical thinking, scientific reasoning, and how superstition and pseudoscience win when reasoning is abandoned. Sagan's "baloney detection kit" — a short chapter near the end — is worth the price of the book on its own.

Modern (post-2000) — focused on fake news, hate speech, and online manipulation

• Robert Paxton — The Anatomy of Fascism (2004). A historian who has spent decades studying fascism strips it back to its mechanics: how movements form, take power, and break. Definitional, not polemical — useful for recognising the form regardless of which side wears it.
• Daniel Kahneman — Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). Nobel laureate in economics, on how the human mind makes decisions — and the predictable errors that make it possible to manipulate one. Probably the single most useful book on this list for understanding why fake news works at all.
• Ryan Holiday — Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator (2012). A practitioner's exposé of how online media — left, right, and centre — is gamed by professionals. Useful because it doesn't blame the audience; it blames the incentives.
• Jonathan Haidt — The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012). A moral psychologist deliberately writing for readers on every side, explaining liberals and conservatives to each other. Few books model intellectual humility better.
• Peter Pomerantsev — This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality (2019). A journalist who grew up under Soviet propaganda and now studies its modern descendants. Reports from disinformation campaigns on multiple continents — not focused on any single country.
• Thomas Rid — Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (2020). Academic history of state-sponsored disinformation from the 1920s to now. Covers both Soviet/Russian and Western (CIA, MI6) campaigns. Detailed, sourced, even-handed.
• Carl Bergstrom & Jevin West — Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World (2020). Practical. How to spot misleading statistics, charts, viral claims, and "science" repackaged for outrage. Adapted from a university course that became a small phenomenon online.
• Julia Ebner — Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists (2020). The author spent two years undercover inside online extremist communities, both far-right and jihadist. Rare for covering both directions of radicalization rather than just the one currently fashionable to criticise.

These lists are short on purpose. Pick one or two from each section and read them slowly. A book read carefully is worth ten books skimmed.

If you find yourself only wanting to read the ones that confirm your existing view, that itself is information about your mental security.

Use AI to help you decide

You can use any current AI assistant as a research partner — if you give it the right starting question. The point is not to outsource your judgment to the AI. The point is to use it to widen the set of options in front of you, so the judgment is still yours, but better informed.

Three prompts to copy and adapt:

To find diverse, independent news on a topic you care about:

"I want to read multiple perspectives on [topic]. List five news outlets, from different countries and different political traditions, that are editorially independent and have known reporting standards. For each, briefly describe their ownership, their political leaning, one strength, and one weakness. Avoid sources owned by political parties, governments, or any single billionaire."

To check a specific claim before you share it:

"I came across this claim: '[paste claim].' Help me check it. List the strongest evidence for it and the strongest evidence against it. Tell me which parts are verifiable fact, which are interpretation, and which are unsupported. Cite primary sources where possible, and tell me where the evidence is genuinely weak on both sides."

To find books on manipulation, propaganda, or political psychology:

"Recommend five books written before the year 2000 that analyse [propaganda / mass manipulation / disinformation / cult dynamics / political extremism / hate speech]. Include at least two books written from different political traditions, so I can see how the technique works across the spectrum and not only from one side. For each book, briefly explain why it is still relevant today."

To find official help in your country if something has gone wrong:

"I'm in [your country]. List the official and reputable services that handle the following: (a) reporting hate speech or threats made online against me or my family, (b) counter-extremism or exit counselling if a family member is being radicalized, (c) victim support for harassment campaigns or coordinated trolling, (d) the national data-protection authority for image-based abuse (deepfakes, intimate-image leaks), and (e) the IFCN-certified fact-checker(s) operating in my language. For each, give the official website and public phone number where one exists. Cite each source. Flag anything that might be outdated."

Two cautions about using AI for this work:

1. AI has its own bias. Different models, owned by different companies, have different defaults. Use two AIs from different companies, on the same question, and notice where their answers disagree — that is where the real questions are.
2. AI can be confidently wrong. Always click through to the original source before you share or act on what the AI tells you. Treat it as a research assistant, not a judge.

The goal of this whole article is not to convince you of anything. The goal is to put a few tools in your hands so that what you do believe, you believe knowingly. That is mental security.

When to escalate beyond chat

• You or your family are being personally targeted — a coordinated campaign against your name, your photo, your business — document everything (screenshots with timestamps, URLs, account names), back up the evidence off the platform, and consult a lawyer. If there are explicit threats of violence, report them to local police; in most countries, threats are a crime even online.
• A family member is being radicalized by an online community and is no longer reachable by the rest of the family — this needs a counsellor, not a debate. Search for "counter-extremism counselling" or "exit counselling" services in your country; many governments and NGOs fund them.
• You are receiving hate messages, threats, or harassment based on who you are — religion, ethnicity, sexuality, gender — most jurisdictions treat this as a criminal matter. Report to the platform with screenshots, then to local police.
• Your child is being pressured, threatened, or recruited in group chats, on TikTok, on Discord, on gaming voice channels — talk to the school first, then the platform, then local police if there are explicit threats or images involved. (See the Child Online Safety card for the broader playbook.)

Related topics

• Child Online Safety — children are the most exposed audience and the least equipped to spot manipulation.
• "I've Been Hacked" — a compromised account in your circle can be used to seed false stories to people who already trust you.
• Identity Theft Recovery — deepfakes and impersonation sit between these two topics; the line between disinformation and impersonation is now blurry.