internet counter-propaganda

01/05/2025

started a new job at the ministry for internet-counter propaganda...

This morning I made a mock flyer inspired by the ones that 20th century militaries used to drop over each other on battlefields. Shoutout to my year 11 modern history teacher who combined design, english and history into a really interesting case study of WW1 propaganda, I learnt a lot. The black and white, semi-ironic vibe is also heavily inspired by art from Arcane Bullshit.

I've been thinking a lot about idealism and normativity on the internet, I think it's something that will inform a lot of my upcoming blog posts. Like, how do we encourage people to engage in certain behaviours on the internet while still respecting their agency and selfhood? Morally propaganda is kind of effed, so even like making an ironic ministry for propaganda poster is kind of distasteful. Like a "ministry" implies centralised authority and "counter-propaganda" is just propaganda with an extra reactionary step right. But at the same time, maybe some form of organised messaging is the only way to make meaningful grassroots reform on the internet, not because people are sheep but because they're so oppressed by the day-to-day grind that they simply don't have time or space to learn/imagine/explore these ideas. So it's our (the ministry's) job not to didactically teach them but rather encourage that imagining and facilitate that time/space. I'm definitely overthinking it, it's just a fun name lol.

In making this I was also thinking about the use of language and how it reinforces certain (Western) power structures on the internet. If anyone has any good articles or books on the topic, lmk! I wrote the message in English (my first language), and then copied it into the next three most popular languages on the internet (according to Wikipedia): Spanish, German, and Japanese.

Anyway, the full poster is below. I made it on Figma, and used Google Translate for the translations. The diagrams are pulled from Google Images, except the middle one which Janey Li found and shared with me a while ago.

Working on another blog post about how much I love hyperlinks, coming soon!