Elements of propaganda in the Western world's political, public health, and media narratives of 2020-2022
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this chapter, we briefly review foundational contributions to the study of propaganda along with examples of the use of propaganda techniques in medicine in the past. We then illustrate and discuss elements of propaganda found in communications from government, public health administration, and the mainstream media during the COVID-19 pandemic from 2020 to early 2022. The examples are drawn from Germany, Canada, and other countries in the Western World. They include elements of simplification and faulty analogies, emotional appeals and scapegoating, and manipulating numbers. We discuss the use of propaganda from an ethical perspective with particular attention to fear narratives, the weakness of the underlying evidence, and the use of moral appeals. We conclude that the use of propaganda techniques to support the COVID-19 pandemic response was unethical, since the broad scope and uniformity of the response measures were not sufficiently established by scientific evidence or by the facts on the ground.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".