Good Day Amy,
Brain washing, marketing, manipulation, propaganda, and memegineering are all terms that mean controlling people by shaping their thoughts in a way that compels them to behave as needed. People are just animals responding to stimuli. How a person responds to a stimulus is based on sensual input filtered through stored memories. Or think of a person like a computer running a program of memories. The person is given input then the memories (the program) processes the input to produce output. The goal of propaganda is to program people with a set of memories (beliefs) that causes them to behave according to predetermined set rules. Like Pavlov’s dog trained to drool when a bell rings, people are trained to exhibit predictable responses.
Stimulus response happens naturally. If you eat a spoiled piece of meat and get sick the memory of that experience will cause a negative reaction when offered a similar looking, smelling, or tasting food in the future. False memories are just as powerful at controlling behavior as are real memories. You eat an orange slice, get violently ill and are told by a doctor that you are violently allergic to fresh orange. Even if you were manipulated, that “false memory” will alter your eating behavior. If you are convinced by a story on the internet that vaccines cause autism, you will not want to have your child vaccinated. Learned stimulus response controls a person’s behavior.
Propaganda is the strategy of controlling people by filling their minds with false memories (false beliefs) to produce a planned response. The idea is to create an information ecosystem that dictates what a population sees and hears. In our fragmented media environment, it is not possible to expose everyone to the same false information, so manipulating a majority “reality” is takes a different approach.
Propaganda today, like content on Fox News is more about pushing conspiracy theories, contradiction, misleading spin, and mistrust. The main goal is to undercut the very notion of truth and establish information chaos. By opening the information space to every kind disinformation reality is destroyed. With no coherent truth available politics is transformed into a tribal-identity contest. Conspiracy and cults thrive in this environment. Bad actors like Trump can get away with claiming “everybody is lying to you, but me.”