ABSTRACT
Information disorders, ranging from individual-level ‘post-truth’ preferences to the distortions wrought by computational propaganda, are central to the field’s concerns. Hate propaganda has a history measurable in millennia, considerably longer than the digitally assisted misinformation that has triggered concern in recent years. Anti-Semitic propaganda paving the way for the Holocaust included the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an elaborate hoax intended to add weight to the conspiracy theory about a Jewish plan for global domination. Both the production and consumption of hate propaganda have undergone a pathological form of democratisation. Hate propagandists are also adept at making censorship and regulation backfire. The most sophisticated hate propaganda is strategic: the communication is designed to achieve goals that go deeper than its superficial intent. Research and policy interventions implicitly apply a ‘toxic bullet’ model of hate propaganda, even as every introductory media effects course debunks the ‘magic bullet’ theory of persuasion.
