Seeing Through Propaganda: A Field Guide to Persuasion, Manipulation, and Power in the AI/Digital Age

We live in an era of unprecedented persuasive sophistication. Propaganda is no longer confined to wartime posters or state broadcasts. It now appears in social media feeds, AI-generated content, political narratives, advertising campaigns, and the everyday information environments we navigate-often without noticing.

Most of us encounter propaganda every day. Most of us fail to recognize it.

Seeing Through Propaganda: A Field Guide to Persuasion, Manipulation, and Power in the AI/Digital Age offers a practical framework for understanding how influence operates-and how to resist it. Drawing on decades of research in rhetoric, persuasion, and communication ethics, this book examines the techniques propagandists use, the psychological vulnerabilities they exploit, and the intellectual habits required to think independently in an age of engineered influence.

The most effective propaganda does not convince you that something false is true. It convinces you that truth itself is unknowable.

Understanding that distinction-between ethical persuasion and systematic manipulation-is not merely an academic concern. It is a civic responsibility.

Written for communication scholars, educators, media literacy practitioners, organizational leaders, and citizens who want to think more clearly and independently, this book provides both the analytical framework and the practical tools to recognize and resist manipulation in all its forms.

Seeing Through Propaganda is part of the CrisisMasters Leadership Library, published by Emperiria Press.

Robert C. Chandler, Ph.D., is a communication scholar, crisis leadership expert, and author whose research spans four decades of emergency management, organizational resilience, and cross-cultural communication. He is the founder and principal of Emperiria LLC and the publisher of Emperiria Press, home of the CrisisMasters Leadership Library.