Propaganda 2.1 Model, Manufacture of Dissent and Monetisation of Outrage

Abstract

This article introduces the Propaganda 2.1 model as a theoretical extension of the author’s earlier Propaganda 2.0 framework, arguing that contemporary online media ecosystems are no longer governed primarily by political, ideological or cultural objectives but by a dominant economic policy of platform capitalism. In this regime, revenue optimisation trumps belief formation, identity construction and persuasive coherence, transforming propaganda from a project of ideological influence into an infrastructure for affect extraction. The model identifies three core mechanisms structuring this new phase. First, rage-baiting or the monetisation of outrage becomes the central commodity form of public discourse, replacing persuasion with the algorithmic optimisation of irritation, humiliation and moral injury. Second, the proliferation of AI ‘slop’ produces a regime of semantic banalisation in which meaning is not distorted but dissolved through excess, flooding the public sphere with syntactically fluent yet cognitively weightless content that exhausts attention rather than informing it. Third, parasociality functions as simulated intimacy, substituting civic belonging and social reciprocity with managed emotional attachment to influencers, automated agents and personalised feeds. Together these mechanisms describe a propaganda system that no longer requires belief, truth or ideological consistency. Outrage replaces conviction, automation replaces meaning, and artificial intimacy replaces sociality, marking the transition from the manufacture of dissent to the liquidation of public opinion itself. Does a media system that no longer seeks to persuade but to provoke still qualify as propaganda, or has it become a different technology of power altogether? If outrage is now more profitable than truth, what remains of public opinion as a democratic force? Can meaning survive in a communicative environment flooded by automated, semantically empty content? And when artificial intimacy replaces social relations, is the public sphere still a space for politics, or only a marketplace for emotions?

Keywords: Propaganda 2.1; monetisation of outrage; rage-baiting; AI slop; banalisation of meaning; parasociality; platform capitalism; attention economy; manufacture of dissent; end of public opinion;

Introduction: What Drives Attention Online?

What is the Propaganda 2.0 model? Peter Ayolov’s Propaganda 2.0 model proposes that the dominant economic logic of contemporary online media is no longer the manufacture of consent, as described by Herman and Chomsky for the era of broadcast mass media, but the systematic manufacture of dissent. Whereas traditional propaganda worked by stabilising elite interests through consensus-building narratives, the digital platform economy profits most effectively from division, moral conflict and emotional volatility. At the centre of this model stands the monetisation of anger, summarised in the formula ‘angry people click more’. Online media does not merely tolerate outrage as a side effect of free expression but engineers it deliberately through the distortion of facts, the framing of information as moral injury, and the constant provocation of identity-based hostility. Engagement metrics transform outrage into a measurable asset, turning political polarisation into a scalable revenue stream. This economic logic follows a renewed principle of divide and rule. Ideological, cultural and identity conflicts are amplified not to clarify public debate but to fracture it into antagonistic moral communities that compete for visibility and recognition. The public sphere becomes an arena of perpetual conflict, described by Ayolov as an online ‘civil cold war’, in which societies conduct continuous internal symbolic warfare that produces global bad news while sustaining platform profitability. In such an environment truth is no longer simply contested; it is structurally destabilised. Scientifically verifiable facts dissolve into competing fabricated narratives chosen not for accuracy but for their emotional resonance with collective identities. Although users appear free to choose their information sources, this freedom operates only within the menu curated by algorithmic infrastructures. Individuals therefore exchange epistemic responsibility for the affective security of belonging to a chosen community, accepting the collective lie as a condition of social participation.

What Drives Attention Online? The mechanisms of Propaganda 2.0 can be observed at the micro-level of interface design through phenomena such as ‘anger clicks’, which in product analytics describe rapid, repeated clicking on the same element when no response is registered. Although developed within usability research as a diagnostic category for user frustration, anger clicks offer a revealing metaphor for the political economy of attention. They mark the precise moment where expectation collides with obstruction and the subject attempts to force meaning or control from an unresponsive system. In technical terms analytics platforms define anger clicks as three or more clicks within two seconds on the same element, distinguishing frustration-driven behaviour from ordinary rapid interaction. In communicative terms they register the breakdown of trust between the user and the interface. These micro-events matter because frustration is not merely a design failure but a monetisable affect. When users experience friction, conversion rates fall, retention declines and abandonment increases, yet the same architecture that produces irritation is repurposed at the content level to generate outrage, thereby sustaining engagement even as satisfaction erodes. The triggers of anger clicks – slow loading, broken buttons, misleading visuals, intrusive overlays or unclear validation – mirror the structural features of the online public sphere itself, where response is delayed, meaning is obscured and resolution is perpetually deferred. Automated detection systems, heatmaps and session replays translate these moments of frustration into datasets, enabling platforms to observe emotional breakdown at scale. In this way attention is captured not by reducing friction but by refining the extraction of negative affect, converting irritation into actionable data and finally into revenue. What emerges is a communicative environment in which anger is no longer a malfunction to be corrected but a resource to be optimised, completing the transition from the manufacture of dissent to the monetisation of outrage that defines the Propaganda 2.1 model.

Chomsky and Herman's five filters for the digital age

Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model identifies five structural filters—ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak and a dominant ideology—through which media content is systematically shaped to serve power while appearing to reflect free and objective journalism. Peter Ayolov’s Propaganda Model 2.0 does not abandon the analytical architecture of Chomsky and Herman’s original five filters; it rewrites them for a media ecology dominated by platforms, algorithms and the political economy of engagement. The classical model described how ownership concentration, dependence on advertising, reliance on elite sourcing, the disciplining function of organised flak and the presence of a unifying ideological enemy constrained journalism in ways that stabilised power through the manufacture of consent. In the digital environment these same structural forces remain, but their operational logic is reversed. The decisive transformation lies in the discovery that ‘angry people click more’. The extraction of emotional reaction, rather than the shaping of rational belief, becomes the dominant economic driver, shifting propaganda from consensus engineering to the systematic manufacture of dissent. Ownership is still concentrated, but the owners are now global technology corporations whose products are no longer newspapers or broadcast channels but algorithmic infrastructures that trade in attention. Their profitability no longer depends on sustaining stable ideological narratives but on maximising engagement velocity. As a result algorithms are calibrated to privilege outrage, humiliation and moral conflict, because these affects generate the highest volumes of interaction. The ownership filter therefore no longer disciplines content toward elite consensus but optimises it for emotional volatility, directly aligning corporate power with rage-baiting dynamics. Advertising remains the core revenue mechanism, yet it has moved from the sale of space in specific outlets to programmatic targeting of individual users in real time. Advertisers no longer reward credibility or informational quality but screen time and behavioural intensity. Content that prolongs exposure and multiplies impressions is automatically favoured, and anger is empirically proven to increase both. In this way the advertising filter is reconfigured into a monetisation engine for outrage, converting emotional disturbance into a measurable financial asset.

Sourcing is simultaneously democratised and weaponised. Traditional dependence on government and corporate sources is supplemented by a flood of user-generated material that circulates without editorial mediation. Sensational, polarising and unverifiable content frequently outperforms institutional journalism because it bypasses verification while appealing directly to pre-existing moral identities. The sourcing filter therefore no longer stabilises authority but destabilises epistemic hierarchies, allowing rage-driven narratives to dominate over factual reporting. Flak, once produced through lawsuits, letters or organised pressure groups, mutates into a digital harassment infrastructure composed of bots, troll farms, mass reporting and coordinated pile-ons. Outrage becomes a weapon that mobilises crowds instantly, overwhelming individuals and institutions through sheer volume of attack. The disciplining function of flak is thus intensified: dissenting voices are not merely criticised but algorithmically buried, deplatformed or silenced through automated hostility. Finally, the ideological filter fragments. Where anticommunism or the war on terror once provided a stable enemy, the platform environment produces a permanent culture war in which the target is endlessly replaceable. Identity conflicts, moral panics and symbolic enemies become renewable resources for engagement. Ideology ceases to unify and begins to divide, not as a political failure but as an economic success. Ayolov’s reformulation shows that the classical filters have not disappeared but have been weaponised by algorithms that exploit human psychology for profit. The audience’s emotional reaction becomes the primary commodity. Rage-baiting is no longer a distortion of journalism but its structural foundation. The propaganda system therefore no longer aims to secure belief but to sustain volatility, producing a feedback loop in which anger drives engagement, engagement drives revenue, and revenue entrenches an economy of permanent manufactured dissent.

From Five Filters to Systemic Power

Joan Pedro’s article ‘The Propaganda Model in the Early 21st Century’, published in International Journal of Communication 5 (2011), revisits Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model with the explicit aim of restoring its analytical vitality for contemporary capitalism and globalised media systems. Pedro begins by reaffirming the original premise of Manufacturing Consent: that news production is structured by a set of five filters — ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak and ideology — which function to orient information toward the reproduction of elite interests. However, the article insists that these filters must no longer be treated as static categories, but as historically mutable mechanisms whose operation changes with each transformation of the political economy of communication. Pedro traces how the reception of the propaganda model unfolded in two phases. During the late 1980s and 1990s the model was largely dismissed, marginalised or caricatured as conspiratorial, deterministic or politically motivated. Empirical research by scholars such as Mullen, Klaehn and Herring later demonstrated that this marginalisation itself confirmed one of the model’s second-order predictions: radical critiques of media power are filtered out of mainstream academic discourse. In the early 2000s, however, a renewed wave of scholarship emerged that sought not to reject the model but to refine and expand it, positioning it firmly within the Marxist-radical political economy tradition against liberal-pluralist views of the media as a neutral marketplace of ideas. Pedro introduces a crucial methodological shift by distinguishing between primary filters, which exert structural dominance, and secondary filters, such as journalistic professionalism, individual agency and technology, which operate only under the constraints imposed by the primary ones. This distinction is central for understanding how apparent autonomy and diversity in journalism coexist with deep systemic subordination to elite power. The article integrates Manuel Castells’ definition of power as a relational capacity to shape meaning through institutions, arguing that propaganda is not merely imposed but produced through asymmetrical relations embedded in ownership, market dependence and institutional hierarchies.

In analysing the ownership filter, Pedro demonstrates how media concentration, conglomeration and financialisation have intensified since the publication of Manufacturing Consent. Media corporations are no longer simply news producers but nodes in transnational networks linking banking, arms, energy and real estate sectors. This interlocking of interests means that journalism is structurally incapable of challenging the economic foundations of capitalism. The commercial imperative, reinforced by deregulation and mergers, has displaced civic values, reduced investigative capacity, and transformed news into a commodity designed to deliver audiences to advertisers rather than citizens to democratic deliberation. The advertising filter is shown to operate not only through direct pressure but through the indirect shaping of content toward a consumerist axiological environment. Pedro highlights how dependence on advertising promotes infotainment, suppresses labour issues, and reframes systemic crises such as climate change in ways that protect corporate interests. The transition to free online content deepens this dependence, tying survival even more tightly to sponsors and marketing logic. With regard to sourcing, Pedro details how cost pressures, time scarcity and information subsidies entrench reliance on official political and corporate sources. Public relations systems, think tanks and embedded journalism transform propaganda into routine news. The Iraq war is presented as a paradigmatic case in which elite disinformation campaigns were laundered through respected outlets via uncritical sourcing and the marginalisation of dissenting experts. Flak, the fourth filter, is reconceptualised as an increasingly diversified apparatus of discipline. It operates as pre-emptive threat, post-hoc attack and ideological reinforcement, amplified by the general patriotic climate of the ‘war on terror’ and, more recently, by digital harassment and right-wing blogging. Media corporations themselves also generate flak in defence of their legitimacy, marginalising critical voices while maintaining the illusion of pluralism.

Pedro’s reworking of the fifth filter replaces anti-communism with the broader category of convergence in the dominant ideology. The enemy is no longer a fixed geopolitical entity but a flexible repertoire of threats — terrorists, rogue states, populists, or ideological deviants — while the pro-factor presents capitalism, humanitarian intervention and market inevitability as benevolent. This ideological convergence permeates all previous filters, naturalising inequality, justifying imperial action and framing consumerism as freedom. Despite these constraints, Pedro insists that the system is not hermetically sealed. Spaces of divergence appear when elite consensus fractures, when dissent becomes profitable, or when journalists exploit marginal openings. Yet such dissent is structurally contained, functioning more as proof of the system’s apparent openness than as a challenge to its foundations. Pedro concludes that the propaganda model remains empirically validated and theoretically indispensable, but only if it is treated as a dynamic framework rather than a frozen schema. The filters must be continuously recalibrated in light of changing technologies, financial structures and ideological formations. In this sense, the article anticipates the need for further versions of the model, moving beyond the late twentieth-century logic of manufacturing consent toward a theory capable of explaining how power today produces meaning, attention and belief within the infrastructures of digital capitalism.

Transition of Propaganda Models

Peter Ayolov’s theory of Propaganda 2.0 situates the contemporary online media environment within a historical trajectory that begins with the classical propaganda model of Herman and Chomsky and culminates today in what can be described as Propaganda 2.1. In the original model, developed for the era of broadcast mass media, propaganda functioned primarily through the manufacture of consent. Structural filters such as ownership concentration, advertising dependency, elite sourcing, organised flak and a unifying ideology worked together to stabilise power by shaping news in ways that appeared neutral while serving dominant interests. This model corresponded to a media system defined by limited channels, slow circulation and relatively stable institutional authority. With the rise of the internet, social media and platform capitalism, these structural filters did not disappear but were reoriented. Propaganda 2.0 marks the moment when the economic logic of online media ceased to prioritise consensus and began to systematically manufacture dissent. Ayolov argues that the central business discovery of the platform age is captured in the formula ‘angry people click more’. Engagement metrics revealed that moral outrage, humiliation and symbolic conflict generate higher levels of interaction than balanced information or rational debate. As a result, online media increasingly monetised anger. Deliberate distortion of facts, emotional framing and polarising narratives became not journalistic failures but profitable strategies.

This shift introduced a renewed principle of divide and rule. Instead of addressing a unified public, platforms fragment audiences into hostile ideological and identity-based camps. The public sphere is transformed into an arena of continuous symbolic warfare, which Ayolov describes as an online civil cold war. Societies conduct permanent internal conflicts that produce constant streams of scandal, resentment and fear. For users this environment feels like informational chaos; for platforms it represents stable and scalable revenue. The epistemic consequences are profound. In a communicative space governed by emotional optimisation, verifiable knowledge loses its authority. Facts are not refuted but drowned in competing myths that reinforce moral communities and collective identities. Users are formally free to choose between sources, yet this freedom is exercised only within the menus curated by algorithmic infrastructures. Individuals therefore trade truth for belonging, accepting the collective lie as a condition of social participation. Propaganda 2.1 extends this logic further in the age of large language models and automated content production. Here the manufacture of dissent is no longer driven solely by human polarisation but by the banalisation of meaning itself. AI-generated ‘slop’ floods the public sphere with syntactically fluent but cognitively weightless texts, exhausting attention rather than persuading belief. Outrage is no longer just monetised; it is industrially scaled, while parasocial simulations replace social bonds. Across this trajectory, propaganda evolves from the manufacture of consent, through the manufacture of dissent, to the monetisation of outrage and the liquidation of meaning, tracing a direct line between technological development and the progressive degradation of public communication.

Propaganda in the Digital Age

Alan MacLeod’s edited volume Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent (2019) sets itself an admirably clear task: to defend the continuing explanatory power of Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model under conditions of platform monopolies, social media and ubiquitous connectivity. The opening claim is polemical but recognisable as the book’s organising conviction: corporate media is not a neutral public service but a weapon of elite interests, and the public is managed through ‘necessary illusions’ rather than informed through disinterested reporting. In this sense, the collection functions as both a reintroduction to Manufacturing Consent and a contemporary brief for why its five-filter framework remains structurally relevant. The book’s own framing, echoed in publisher descriptions, is explicit that the aim is to ‘update’ the propaganda model for the twenty-first century while insisting that its core logic still holds. The strength of this project lies in its refusal to reduce propaganda to conspiracy or to individual journalistic bias. MacLeod repeats the model’s essential methodological wager: media effects should be explained structurally, through ownership concentration, advertising dependence, sourcing routines, flak, and a stabilising ideology, rather than through a morality play about good and bad reporters. That insistence remains valuable at a time when media criticism is often diverted into culture-war moralism or the scapegoating of ‘fake news’ as a purely cognitive failure of audiences. The volume also gains rhetorical weight from its inclusion of an interview with Noam Chomsky, which anchors the book’s continuity claim and restates the argument that internet distribution does not automatically dissolve institutional power over news agendas.

Yet the book’s central thesis, signalled by its subtitle ‘Still Manufacturing Consent’, also marks its principal limitation. The insistence on continuity risks misdescribing the dominant tendency of online media after the full maturation of engagement-driven platforms. The five filters can certainly be mapped onto the digital environment, but the decisive shift is not simply that consent is still manufactured; it is that the production of consent has become only one instrument inside a broader revenue regime in which emotional volatility is often more profitable than ideological alignment. A media system can serve elite interests while simultaneously maximising profit through polarisation, humiliation, scandal and moral outrage. In other words, propaganda can be structurally loyal to power without being consensual in tone. This is precisely the point at which Propaganda 2.0 becomes necessary: the old model describes how dissent is marginalised; the platform model shows how dissent is manufactured, staged and monetised as a commodity. MacLeod’s collection, published in 2019, is positioned at a hinge moment: mature social platforms had already reorganised distribution and attention, but the current wave of generative automation had not yet fully industrialised the production of content. Even so, the book tends to treat the internet primarily as a new channel carrying the old institutional news product, rather than as an economic machine that optimises for engagement regardless of epistemic quality. The consequence is that outrage appears mostly as a political by-product of propaganda battles or as a pathology of misinformation, rather than as a revenue primitive. This matters because the contemporary propaganda environment increasingly behaves less like a system that manufactures agreement and more like a system that manufactures reaction, where attention is captured by provocation and retained through conflict. Consent is often less an achieved ideological unity than a resigned habituation to the platform’s emotional weather, a constant readiness to react on cue.

Manufacturing Noise

Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent (2019) ultimately misses the historical transition whereby each new media ecology generates its own rules and meanings, because it treats digital platforms as mere extensions of old structures rather than as technologies that rewrite propaganda itself, confirming that every new medium does not just transmit messages but produces them. The emergent form of consent in the mid-2020s is frequently not consent to a specific policy or worldview, but consent to banality itself: the passive acceptance of low-grade, endlessly replicated discourse that fills public space while emptying it of deliberative capacity. Generative systems accelerate what could be called semantic inflation: texts become abundant, stylistically plausible, and socially shareable, while meaning loses scarcity, friction and cost. In such a condition, the propaganda function does not need to impose a single narrative; it can instead flood the field until the distinction between persuasion, information, entertainment and automated filler becomes practically irrelevant. The outcome is not simply false belief but cognitive exhaustion and interpretive apathy. If anything deserves the name ‘manufacturing consent’ in this environment, it is the manufacturing of acceptance that public language can be treated as disposable, that political ideas can be consumed as content, and that social change can be reduced to performative scripts, monetised ‘AI lectures’, or influencer-ready slogans. A further limitation follows from the book’s largely news-centred framing. Several chapters (as indicated by the volume’s published table of contents) extend the propaganda model to contemporary themes such as ‘fake news’, bots, Syria, entertainment, and elections, which broadens the empirical range, yet the collection remains oriented toward journalism as the core theatre of propaganda. ([eBay][3]) The platform age, however, collapses the boundary between journalism and non-journalism. Memes, reaction videos, livestreams, micro-celebrity commentary, recommender feeds, and parasocial performance do not merely supplement news; they reconstitute the conditions under which ‘news’ is even perceived. A propaganda model that remains anchored primarily in newsroom institutions risks missing the ways propaganda now travels through simulated intimacy and identity theatre, where the persuasive force lies less in argument than in the feeling of belonging, proximity, and moral synchronisation.

MacLeod is therefore right to insist that Herman and Chomsky’s structural critique still illuminates concentrated ownership, advertising incentives, elite sourcing and disciplinary flak in the digital age. The problem is that the phrase ‘still manufacturing consent’ can function as an analytical comfort blanket, implying that the primary historical task remains the same, merely executed through new tools. A more adequate diagnosis recognises a transition in dominant tendency: from manufacturing consent in the broadcast era, to manufacturing dissent through engagement economics in the platform era, to monetising outrage while banalising meaning through automated content in the era of AI slop. Consent has not vanished; it has mutated into a lower, quieter form: consent to noise, consent to exhaustion, consent to a public sphere that feels permanently active yet increasingly incapable of producing durable understanding or coherent collective change.

Propaganda Model 2.0 as an Operating System

Christian Fuchs, in the chapter ‘Propaganda 2.0: Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model in the Age of the Internet, Big Data and Social Media’, treats the classic propaganda model not as a relic of Cold War media, but as a living framework that has to mutate with each new technological regime. The starting point is historical: nearly three decades after Manufacturing Consent, the Soviet Union is gone, neoliberalism has intensified, financialisation has normalised crisis, inequality has deepened, and nationalism, xenophobia and new racisms have expanded. The practical media ecology has also shifted: advertising migrates from print into targeted online markets; platforms become news intermediaries; data extraction becomes routine; and public attention is increasingly organised by algorithmic ranking rather than editorial judgement. Under these conditions, the question is no longer whether Herman and Chomsky’s five filters still exist, but how they recombine inside digital capitalism, where the rules of distribution and visibility are part of the infrastructure itself. Fuchs insists on two simultaneous claims that matter for any contemporary update. First, the propaganda model’s central intuition remains stable: wealth and power shape what becomes newsworthy, what is amplified, what is marginalised, and what becomes thinkable as common sense. Second, the model was never a complete theory of propaganda, because it does not fully justify why exactly five filters are decisive, and it underplays entertainment, spectacle, and the structural drift toward depoliticised communication. The implication is methodological: the propaganda model works best as an operating system for critique, a set of interacting constraints that can be patched, extended, and versioned. In that sense, the move from Propaganda 2.0 toward 2.1, 2.2, and beyond is not rhetorical branding but a recognition that media systems are iterative technologies of power: each platform era changes the interface through which the old constraints operate.

In the first filter, ownership and profit orientation remain, but the centre of gravity shifts toward platform capitalism. Fuchs underlines that the most consequential “media owners” are now the corporations controlling the infrastructures of search and feed distribution. Their control is expressed not only through ownership concentration, but through proprietary, opaque algorithms that rank, recommend, and suppress content in ways that structure political visibility. The key novelty is that users are excluded from meaningful control over the algorithmic systems that increasingly function as public gateways to news, while intellectual property and competition normalise secrecy. What appears as decentralised participation is therefore nested inside centralised rule-setting. The second filter, advertising, becomes more intimate and more invasive. The basic dependence on advertisers continues, but targeted advertising changes the logic of influence: instead of buying space in a known publication, advertisers buy access to tracked individuals. Fuchs stresses that this accelerates a spiral in which money and targeting capacity reinforce platform monopolies, while traditional journalism’s commercial base weakens. He also adds a crucial element that sits uneasily inside the original model: advertising today is inseparable from the exploitation of audience labour. On social media, users do not simply consume propaganda; they produce data, attention, and behavioural traces that are commodified and sold. This deepens the system’s incentive to maximise engagement, not as a vague cultural trend, but as an economic requirement. The sourcing filter becomes more complex because networks converge production, distribution, and consumption. The internet’s architecture allows more people to publish, but it does not equalise attention. Instead, the decisive struggle shifts toward visibility, which is itself produced through time, labour, and money. Fuchs points out that mainstream news organisations still dominate online attention because they carry resources and inherited audiences, and that reputational hierarchies and paid boosting allow wealthy actors to purchase prominence. The result is not the disappearance of sourcing, but its multiplication: sources now include legacy institutions, influencers, brands acting like publishers, and automated agents that can simulate human participation. Flak, in turn, is upgraded into networked lobbying and automated intimidation. Complaint, threat, and punitive pressure now operate at scale through coordinated harassment, bot amplification, and mobilisation across platforms. Fuchs’ discussion of political bots matters here because it shows how the appearance of “public opinion” can be manufactured by automated activity, which then feeds journalism, analytics, and political strategy. Flak becomes faster, cheaper, and more continuous, and it targets not only newsrooms but individuals, movements, and any actor trying to gain attention without platform favour.

Finally, the ideology filter is generalised beyond anti-communism into a wider field of dominant ideologies and crisis narratives. Fuchs distinguishes between ideologies of the internet, which justify instrumental control, surveillance, and market inevitability, and ideologies on the internet, such as racism, nationalism, and online fascism. The defining tendency is algorithmic amplification: ideologies that are sensational, simplified, and emotionally charged often draw attention, and attention is rewarded by systems built to intensify engagement. The fifth filter therefore does not disappear; it becomes more plastic, more user-generated, and more tightly coupled to platform incentives. Taken together, Fuchs’ update points to a broader pattern: the propaganda model in digital capitalism is less a fixed diagram than a developing operating system. Each new layer of technology does not abolish the old filters; it rewrites how they execute, where they sit in the stack, and how they interact with labour, surveillance, speed, and spectacle. That is why the trajectory toward Propaganda 2.1, 2.2, and beyond is not optional. It is the only way critique can keep pace with infrastructures that continuously redesign the conditions of attention, truth, and political possibility.

The Propaganda Model Lives

This section draws from the book The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness, edited by Joan Pedro-Carañana, Daniel Broudy and Jeffery Klaehn (2018), which reaffirms the relevance of Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model while situating it within the deep structural transformations of contemporary capitalism, digital media and political power. The editors begin by reminding readers that the model was never intended as a closed doctrine, but as a dynamic analytical framework capable of travelling across historical contexts, technologies and political systems. Its endurance, they argue, is precisely the reason for its systematic marginalisation within mainstream academia and corporate journalism. The reception history of the propaganda model is itself part of its explanatory power. Since the publication of Manufacturing Consent in 1988, the model has been persistently caricatured as conspiratorial, deterministic or overly simplistic. Yet this marginalisation fulfils one of Herman and Chomsky’s original predictions: a theory that exposes the structural foundations of elite power will itself be filtered out of legitimate discourse. At the same time, the editors document a steady revival of the model among critical scholars worldwide, who have applied it to contexts ranging from Europe to Latin America, from war reporting to entertainment media, demonstrating its capacity to illuminate how power shapes information flows across diverse environments. Crucially, Pedro-Carañana, Broudy and Klaehn insist that the propaganda model must be understood as part of the radical political economy tradition. It does not treat media bias as the outcome of bad journalism or ideological deviation, but as the systemic effect of capitalist organisation. Media institutions are embedded in an alliance between corporate capital and political-State power, whose interests converge around the reproduction of inequality, militarism and market discipline. The five filters are therefore not independent variables but interlocking mechanisms that channel journalism toward the maintenance of this order while preserving the appearance of pluralism.

The editors stress that the propaganda model is not a universal law of communication. It does not apply to societies where the manufacture of consent is unnecessary because collective goals are genuinely shared or because coercion replaces ideology. Yet in capitalist democracies, where overt repression would be illegitimate, propaganda becomes the primary instrument of rule. This insight links the model to a longer intellectual tradition that stretches from Machiavelli through Comte and Gramsci to Bernays, Lippmann and Lasswell. All recognised that in formally democratic societies power must be exercised through the management of perception, emotion and belief rather than through violence alone. The book’s introduction is particularly important for understanding the transformation of propaganda in the age of digital media. The editors reject techno-utopian narratives according to which the internet naturally produces democratisation, participation and equality. Instead, they document how the internet has been rapidly enclosed by corporate and State power, producing a hybrid system of surveillance, commodification and algorithmic control. Platforms that were once imagined as tools of emancipation are now integrated into a global system of capital accumulation, data extraction and political influence. The means of communication no longer merely transmit ideology; they increasingly operate as ideological infrastructures in their own right. This shift has profound implications for the propaganda model. While the five filters remain operative, their mode of operation is changing. Ownership is no longer confined to newspapers and broadcasters but includes platform monopolies that structure visibility through opaque algorithms. Advertising is no longer limited to the placement of products but has become a regime of behavioural manipulation based on data extraction and micro-targeting. Sourcing is no longer dominated exclusively by official institutions but is supplemented by influencer cultures, pseudo-experts and algorithmically amplified user-generated ideology. Flak is no longer restricted to formal complaints but now includes digital harassment, coordinated outrage campaigns and the mobilisation of networked mobs. Ideology is no longer organised around a single enemy such as communism but has fragmented into fluid culture wars, fear narratives and identity conflicts.

The editors describe this configuration as a system of symbolic violence in which liberal media perform a particularly insidious role. Liberal outlets present themselves as defenders of diversity, gender equality and civil rights, yet systematically avoid questioning the economic foundations of capitalism. They practise what Nancy Fraser has termed progressive neoliberalism: the fusion of cultural recognition with economic domination. By celebrating diversity while ignoring class, labour and exploitation, liberal media function as governors of discourse, policing the limits of what can be thought without appearing to do so. At the same time, the book refuses a fatalistic reading of media power. It acknowledges that digital media remain contradictory spaces in which control and resistance coexist. Grassroots movements, alternative outlets and critical journalists periodically open cracks in the system, especially during moments of crisis. Yet these openings are fragile, often short-lived, and easily absorbed by the dominant order. The editors therefore insist that any meaningful transformation of media systems requires broader social and political change, including the dismantling of the corporate-State nexus that structures contemporary communication. In this sense, The Propaganda Model Today implicitly points toward the future evolution of the model itself. If the original framework described manufacturing consent under broadcast capitalism, and subsequent revisions addressed digital platforms and surveillance capitalism, the current phase suggests that the model is becoming an operating system of power, one that evolves in versions rather than editions. Propaganda no longer merely filters news; it now organises attention, emotion and belief at the infrastructural level of society. From this perspective, the propaganda model is not static but developmental, moving toward new iterations that could be described as Propaganda 2.1, 2.2 and beyond, as each transformation of media technology generates not only new messages but new rules for the production of reality itself.

Propaganda Model 3.0: Testing the Hypotheses, Updating the Filters

In the concluding synthesis of The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness (Joan Pedro-Carañana, Daniel Broudy and Jeffery Klaehn, 2018), the propaganda model is treated less as a historical artefact than as a living diagnostic tool whose empirical claims can be tested, extended, and recompiled for new media environments. The editors return to the three core hypotheses proposed by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky as the model’s practical criteria of validation, and then use the evidence collected across the volume to ask a forward-looking question: if the model still works, what version of the media ‘operating system’ is now running, and what would an upgraded propaganda model need to track next? The first hypothesis concerns content alignment: when elite interests are strong, elite consensus is broad, and oppositional forces are weak or disorganised, the most influential media will tend to support elite projects domestically and internationally. The volume’s case studies, as summarised by the editors, confirm this prediction across a wide range of topics and geographies. Mainstream coverage in both online and offline systems exhibits familiar patterns: some victims become ‘worthy’ and others ‘unworthy’; some conflicts are amplified while comparable conflicts are ignored; some malefactors are demonised while others are normalised. War and intervention narratives, nuclear deterrence, austerity, inequality, race relations, and the delegitimation of emergent social movements appear repeatedly as sites where dominant frames hold. Even when climate change receives dramatic attention, the deeper political-economic drivers tend to remain strangely unanalysed, as if catastrophe can be narrated vividly while the structural causes must remain politely unnamed. The pattern matters because it suggests that the most consequential boundary in public discourse is not the intensity of coverage but the permitted explanatory horizon: what may be described in vivid detail is not necessarily what may be explained in systemic terms. At the same time, this book’s distinctive contribution to the first hypothesis lies in how it broadens the object ‘media’. The model is no longer applied only to news but also to entertainment ecosystems: television programming surrounding news, professional sports, videogames, search engines, social networks, and Hollywood film. Here, the hypothesis becomes more difficult to measure with simple content counts, yet the editors argue that textual and political economy analysis can still identify how entertainment products cluster around elite consensus. The typology that emerges is instructive: some products overtly endorse establishment goals; others perform critique while finally stabilising the system; a smaller number genuinely challenge hegemonic power and are marginalised; and a rare remainder ‘breaks through’ the filtration system for irregular reasons, usually with caveats and limited promotion. In other words, entertainment is not a neutral escape from propaganda but often its soft infrastructure: it teaches expectations about human nature, institutions, violence, and hierarchy while disguising this instruction as leisure.

The second hypothesis concerns mechanism: the five filters—ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and dominant ideology—should strongly shape media systems governed by market forces rather than direct state censorship. The editors report that the book’s contributors find the filters not weakened but intensified under contemporary conditions. Ownership consolidates under corporate concentration and financial capital, often shielded by secrecy. Advertising evolves beyond commercials into native advertising, branded content, product placement, and surveillance-based targeting that normalises commercialism while eroding privacy. Sourcing remains tethered to ‘safe’ institutional channels, but now also includes newer forms of manipulation such as bots and platform-driven amplification. Flak expands into networked harassment and hate-speech dynamics, unevenly distributed according to resources and organisation; the cases of Snowden, Assange, and Manning are used as indicators of how severe punishment can become when disclosures threaten the system. The fifth filter, framed as dominant ideology, appears in renewed forms: neoliberal commercialism, entrepreneurialism, cynicism, and securitised language that divides the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’, with evidence also offered for a revived anti-communism used to discipline reformist or redistributive movements. Yet the editors also emphasise a dialectical feature that becomes central for any future version of the model: wherever commodification spreads, practices of non-profit sharing and oppositional communication also emerge. People block ads, seek alternative outlets, and sometimes organise collectively against flak. Digital systems enable tighter cultural control, but they also lower the technical threshold for participation. For the first time in history, most people can publish, remix, and distribute content at scale. This does not dissolve hierarchy—visibility still concentrates in a small elite of accounts, and mainstream media content is recycled widely online while citizen content is less often recycled by mainstream institutions—but it alters the terrain of struggle. Propaganda is still powerful, yet exceptions are not anomalies to ignore; they become empirical clues about agency, timing, and vulnerability within the system. This takes the argument to the question of extensibility. If the first hypothesis about content alignment is repeatedly validated, are the explanatory principles exhaustive in the internet era? The editors consider additions that point toward the next ‘operating system’ conceptually. One proposed extension is the ‘propaganda and security system’: the wider nexus of state-corporate decision-making, policy formation, surveillance, intelligence services, PR infrastructure, think tanks, NGOs, co-opted journalism, and even academic gatekeeping. This is not merely ‘media’ influencing audiences; it is a coordinated environment of information management, distortion, omission, and misdirection that pre-structures what can appear as reality in the first place. Another proposed extension is agency: the organised capacities of social movements, journalists, and audiences-users. The model’s structural emphasis is retained, but the editors insist that structure operates through socialisation, fear, professional incentives, precarious labour, and occasional resistance. Journalists internalise institutional values, yet unions, professional organisation, social currents, and the demand for ‘journalist stars’ can open narrow spaces of autonomy, particularly during crises.

The third hypothesis concerns marginalisation: critical studies of media performance will tend to be ignored or sidelined. The editors argue that this marginalisation is accomplished without overt censorship, through political economy inside academia itself. Funding and prestige flow toward large, data-intensive, depoliticised research programmes that treat journalism as micro-practice rather than as an institution embedded in structural power. Publishing incentives and monopolistic academic markets further reward work that avoids naming the system. The model therefore predicts not only how media produce consensus, but also how the academy helps stabilise the boundaries of permissible critique. Taken together, the book’s conclusion implies a future hypothesis for a next version of the propaganda model: media power is migrating from content to infrastructure. The crucial mechanisms may increasingly operate at the level of platform design, algorithmic ranking, attention engineering, data extraction, and behavioural prediction—functions that do not simply filter messages but organise the conditions of visibility, virality, and social coordination. If Manufacturing Consent described a propaganda model suited to an era of broadcast institutions, this volume points toward a propaganda model suited to an era in which the media ‘operating system’ is the environment itself: the interface through which social reality is encountered, ordered, and emotionally processed. A future PM would therefore need to keep the original hypotheses while adding a new layer: not only which stories appear and which frames dominate, but how the architecture of digital life produces default perceptions, default emotions, and default enemies—before any story is even read.

Coclusion: The Medium is Writing the Message

The concluding claim of Propaganda in the Information Age is that the old formula still holds: new media, same old rules, and the media is therefore still manufacturing consent. Yet this formulation increasingly fails to describe what is structurally happening inside contemporary communication systems. The digital environment has not merely intensified the classical filters; it has re-engineered the very conditions under which influence operates. The internet does not simply transmit propaganda more efficiently – it reorganises the political economy of attention itself. McLuhan’s provocation that ‘the medium is the message’ is no longer metaphorical but literal: the architecture of platforms, metrics and automation now produces meaning before any ideological content is added. Where the classical model assumed that propaganda stabilised power through persuasion, today power is stabilised through volatility. Consent is no longer the dominant output; reaction is. Outrage is not a side-effect of distortion but the commodity form of discourse. The book demonstrates with great empirical richness that ownership is more concentrated, advertising more invasive, sourcing more official and flak more efficient. Yet it underestimates the historical mutation of propaganda’s objective. The system no longer needs to make people agree; it needs to keep them emotionally activated. Polarisation does not threaten the model – it fuels it.

This is why the formula ‘still manufacturing consent’ now misleads. The consent that is being produced in the mid-2020s is not consent to policies or ideologies but consent to banality. AI-generated ‘slop’ floods the public sphere with endlessly replicable lectures, summaries, hot takes and pseudo-insights that convert the idea of social change into monetisable content formats. Political hope itself is algorithmically packaged, stripped of risk, and sold back as spectacle. Outrage generates the traffic; automation fills the space; parasocial performance simulates community. What remains is not a public but a managed emotional environment. The propaganda model therefore does not fail – but it no longer describes the dominant tendency of power. The system does not merely manufacture dissent; it monetises anger and exhausts meaning. What now operates under the name of propaganda is no longer primarily a doctrine of persuasion but an infrastructure that engineers reaction. Public opinion does not disappear, but it is thinned into episodic emotional surges that cannot stabilise into collective judgement or political agency. Meaning does not vanish through censorship but through saturation, as automated discourse overwhelms the conditions under which understanding can form. The public sphere persists only as a simulation, populated by managed attachments that feel social while remaining structurally isolating. Therefore, the medium does not merely carry propaganda any longer, but composes a system in which propaganda is no longer needed. The new media does not carry the old rules forward. It writes new ones into the very grammar of perception. The medium is no longer a channel of propaganda. It has become propaganda’s operating system.

Bibliography

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Chomsky, N. and Herman, E.S. (1988) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon.

Pedro-Carañana, J., Broudy, D. and Klaehn, J. (2018a) ‘Introduction’, in Pedro-Carañana, J., Broudy, D. and Klaehn, J. (eds.) The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness. London: University of Westminster Press, pp. 1–18. Available at: https://doi.org/10.16997/book27.a

Pedro-Carañana, J., Broudy, D. and Klaehn, J. (2018b) ‘Conclusion’, in Pedro-Carañana, J., Broudy, D. and Klaehn, J. (eds.) The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness. London: University of Westminster Press, pp. 279–286. Available at: https://doi.org/10.16997/book27.r

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Fuchs, C. (2018) ‘Propaganda 2.0: Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model in the Age of the Internet, Big Data and Social Media’, in Pedro-Carañana, J., Broudy, D. and Klaehn, J. (eds.) The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness. London: University of Westminster Press, pp. 71–92.

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