Comment by parthdesai 5 days ago
I think you're being sarcastic, but just in case you're not
> Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic manipulation of information—including facts, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion, attitudes, and behaviors toward a specific cause, ideology, or agenda.
A large percentage of Americans are convinced that police will just shoot them if they happen to feel like it.
Even including ICE in this statistic, you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop. Police encounters that turn deadly, not even blatant murder, are on the order of 1 in 50,000.
However, that stream of police murder videos are definitely real.
Propaganda is often stoking tiny sparks into large raging forest fires.
> police will just shoot them if they happen to feel like it.
Well that's exactly the problem. There's nothing stopping them: no accountability, no justice. Many cops just don't feel like randomly shooting people, and that's good. The problem is if they do, and even if they brag about it, little will be done.
Take for example the latest Sainte-Soline repression scandal revealed a few months back by Mediapart [1] where videos show dozens of riot cops making a contest about maiming the most people, encouraging one another to break engagement rules, and advocating for outright murder. Everybody knew before the bodycam videos, but now that we have official proof, we're still waiting for any kind of accountability.
If i go around and shoot people, there is no way i will avoid prison. If a cop goes around and shoots people, or strangles people to death, prison is a very unlikely outcome.
> you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop
That's not how statistics work. Police abuse tends to happen in the same low-income social groups (and ethnic minorities). As an example, living in France, i've met several people who had a family member killed by police. Statistically unlikely if i only hung around in "startup nation" or "intellectual bourgeoisie" circles, which is not my case.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifestation_du_25_mars_2023_...
Being killed by police is different than being murdered by police.
Police in the US kill somewhere around 1000 people a year. But of those, it's something like 5-10 that are murders. There is maybe 1 every few years where the cop is itching to shoot someone who is clearly compliant and not a threat.
The 990 police killing videos that become available every year now are not particularly compelling, because its bad actors trying to kill police and getting themselves killed.
Sorry, I don't know anything about France and police though. The US has a different dynamic because guns are everywhere, especially where crime is. Every cop knows about the ~50 cops who are killed by guns every year.
The dynamic doesn't look very different here, at least from reading the news. I don't know about the US (though i suspect <1% murder out of all police killings is a gross under-estimation), just for anyone's curiosity, in France police killing of a threatening person is the outlier. [1]
We don't have guns circulating freely around here (though some people have them such as for hunting). Many police murders take place in police custody (such as El Hacen Diarra just this month). According to the most comprehensive stats i could find [2], out of 489 deaths by police shootings (1977-2022), 275 victims were entirely unarmed.
[1] Not very scientific method: any case of police being assaulted and using "self-defense" is widely spread in the media, and those few cases per year don't account for the dozens of deaths every year.
> Even including ICE in this statistic, you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop.
Uh.. I know someone who was murdered by cops while having a bad LSD trip (not violent, just incoherent). He was restrained too tightly despite protests of his family, loaded into a vehicle, and suffocated to death.
> Police encounters that turn deadly, not even blatant murder, are on the order of 1 in 50,000.
Oh I see, you don't consider this murder.
>Even including ICE in this statistic, you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop. Police encounters that turn deadly, not even blatant murder, are on the order of 1 in 50,000.
That just shows that people's social circles aren't that wide. 1 in 50,000 is rare in your personal bubble. For a town of 1 million people, thats 20 people.
Sounds tiny, but if we were to line up 20 people and have them murdered by law enforcement, it'd pretty much end the careers of anyone in that chain of command. Because that's not a behavior you want to let spread and expand.
I am not being sarcastic at all. It is a common misconception that propaganda means lies. Propaganda is information designed to get you to believe a certain thing or feel a certain way. The best propaganda uses entirely truthful statements to manipulate your beliefs and emotions.
One of the best examples of this were the endless photos and information about stocked store shelves, filled with fresh goods at dirt cheap prices, during the Cold War. In general truth is the best propaganda, because when you lie there's always a rubber-band effect when somebody realizes, sooner or later, that they've been had.
Propaganda is information which supports a specific cause, whether true or false.
If you think "propaganda" is defined as something being lies, then you have misunderstood the word.
Product advertising is the most widespread form of propaganda. And in some non-english countries it is called "propaganda" and not "marketing".
> deliberate, systematic manipulation of information
And, what are we doing with those facts? We're manipulating them lol
It's using information to influence public opinion in a calculated manner. Said information can include facts. It can even be entirely factual.
Manipulating the feed of a social media website for the purpose of swaying the viewer's opinion is a cut and dry example of propaganda. Doesn't matter who does it or whether the information displayed is factual or not. Those things make zero difference.
This really doesn't pass the sniff test. It reminds me of a recent post I saw: "what are movies people like only becsuse it is good?", calling it "quality slop". It's contradictory.
If people are given a wide perspective of a situation and adjusts bias for the Overton window (aka, we don't let Nazis have an equal platform to a more progressive group), then we just call that good reporting. The act of convincing people isn't inherently a bad thing. How you do it matters a lot.
Sometimes what you choose to show, even if true, can impact how people see a situation or fact. That is what the OP is referring to. Your quote even mentions that propaganda can be made of "facts" and "half-truths" (a half-truth is usually a fact with a portion omitted to change the interpretation of the fact).