Since second grade, senior Brooke Cohen has regularly consumed the news. As a result, she has developed strategies to detect bias and assess the accuracy of information she encounters.

“As I learned more in school about propaganda and I understood the definition of it more, I was able to comprehend what I was seeing,” said Cohen. “I knew that these commercials and these different ads and promotions weren’t necessarily unbiased and straightforward. I was able to put it together and be like, ‘Oh, this is propaganda, this is all around me, and I need to be more aware of that if I want to consume news.’”

According to Julia Jose, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at New York University, propaganda is any sort of information aimed at influencing or manipulating public opinion. 

People are susceptible to propaganda because emotional reasoning often overrides logical thinking, making individuals vulnerable to emotionally-charged language in propaganda, Jose said. 

“We are logical, but we are also emotional,” said Jose. “So it’s pretty easy to use psychological tactics to influence us.”

Propaganda is often crafted using rhetorical techniques such as name-calling and loaded language, Jose said.

“There’s ‘name-calling,’ which is basically [referring to your opponent with] a negative or a positive term, and usually, it’s negative,” said Jose. “Calling them a name that people usually associate with really negative connotations is really common. The other one is ‘loaded language,’ which is using phrases… [to create] this impression in people’s heads, like, ‘Oh my [gosh], that’s such a bad thing.’ Just amplifying the effect of something by using phrases that are really emotionally charged.”

According to Guy Rolnik, professor of strategic management at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, governments and private entities use propaganda to advance their causes, gain votes, persuade, push particular ideas and shape public sentiment. 

“To persuade people and to gain power, you need to convince people [of] your ideas, values and narrative,” Rolnik said.

Propaganda can be interpreted as harmful or beneficial depending on one’s perspective, Rolnik said. 

“In effective propaganda, there is always a grain or core of truth that is mixed with manipulation,” Rolnik said.

According to Ritik Roongta, a Ph.D.student studying web privacy and security at New York University, it can be difficult to identify the impacts of propaganda because people cannot verify propaganda’s correctness, yet still believe what they see.

“At the end of the day, it boils down to how effectively you can actually sway the emotions of the people and the sentiments of the people,” said Roongta. “And that makes [identifying propaganda] very tricky, because once you change the emotions of the people, then you can make them do anything that you want.”

Researchers use large language models, also known as LLMs, to identify and flag propaganda online, Roongta said.

LLMs analyze large sets of data to recognize patterns in how certain words or phrases trigger sentiments in humans, allowing them to generalize and identify similar associations in new texts they have never seen before, Roongta said.

The increasing exposure to propaganda and manipulative narratives due to the digital world has highlighted the need for advanced tools like LLMs to detect and analyze these sources of information more effectively, Roongta said.

According to Jose, the digital world has made it easy for anyone with internet access to spread propaganda and influence others.

“It’s easy for us to get carried away because we’re passively consuming information,” said Jose. “There’s so much information online, it’s not easy [to actively consume]. It’s insanely difficult to cautiously consume every single [piece of] information that we are reading.”

According to Cohen, when evaluating new content, she looks for language that conveys open-mindedness and relies on news sources that she has found to be relatively unbiased. 

“Anytime I do look at the news, or engage with any current events, I keep in mind that there’s only so much I can know, and there’s only a certain extent of unbiased information I can get,” said Cohen. “There’s always gonna be a little bit of a bias, and I think being conscious of that is important.”