Target Propaganda by Function

Rather than litigating a single philosophical definition of propaganda, public debate and policy should classify and respond to propaganda by the social effects it produces (e.g., trust erosion, consent engineering, stereotype‑deployment). This reorientation makes remedies—regulation, platform rules, media literacy—match the harms they aim to fix instead of trying to police a slippery label. — Shifting from a definitional to a functional approach changes what laws, platform policies, and journalistic standards would actually try to prevent or mitigate.