Comic Strips

Those ideas you listed are indeed often spread by means of propaganda, but the word propaganda has gained a negative connotation that is itself lacking nuance and is thus undeserved.

Any information disseminated that reflects the views or interests of any particular doctrine or cause - even just your own - is propaganda. If you have publicly expressed any sort of political opinion at all, you have engaged in propaganda.

The word was more useful when widely disseminating information required lots of resources or coordinated effort. Now that anyone can easily do so in a second, the word casts too wide a net to be useful in determining what information is expressed in earnest, and what information is deceptive.

When I see propaganda I first consider where it's coming from. Does it have the backing of mainstream media? Is it publicly/privately funded? Is it facing opposition, and if so from who? Is it grassroots or is it astroturfing?

Edit: Using the comic we're commenting under as an example, it is indeed propaganda. That of course is not a useful categorization, so we'll consider its' source. The creator of this comic Alzward is independent and their funding seems to come both from crowdsourcing and from selling access to their comics on Webtoons. The scale suggests this is just an independent artist supporting themselves, and that their art - and by extension this comic - is not influenced by money to a great extent. From this we can infer that the views expressed in this comic are expressed in earnest by the artist. The artist's views may themselves be influenced, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion. In other words, this is grassroots propaganda.

I think there's an important distinction to make here between how people come to believe something, and whether or not they're true. Propaganda can cause people to believe things that are true for incorrect/wrong reasons.

Are all of these believed by people for bad reasons due to propaganda? Sure. Are all of them false? I don't think so. Most of them have some truth in them, but oversimplify or overgeneralize from those facts, and nuance is important in understanding them.

I'd agree with all of these in a heartbeat! Thanks for sharing. I feel like most of these are matching the general vibe I get from lemmy anyways. However, I'm sure there are more than enough things on here and in my bubble "everyone agrees" about that are just wrong, like you said. The Israel/Hamas thing was the latest example where I disagreed with lots of people. Maybe some other comments will show me some of my own wrong opinions.

Well done, got my hackles up with at least 3 of those.