They are ramping up the propaganda again. After forcing nearly half of the world’s population to get the first round of shots, they are coming out with a new vaccine in response to yet another – deadly strain of COVID-19. I am convinced that the “plannedemic” was nothing more than an experiment in gaining compliance through media messaging. How do people process information, and what motivates them to adopt the recommended behaviors? This question falls right in line with Joost Meerloo’s statement from his book, The Rape of the Mind – “at this very moment, elaborate research into motivation is going on, whose aim is to find out why and what the buyer likes to buy. What makes him tick?” This is quite the question. For decades, social psychologists have been studying how to effectively change attitudes and opinions to be compliant with political objectives. According to the book Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, millions of dollars are spent every year to understand how persuasive communications motivate people to accept the tenets of a communicated message. When it comes to COVID-19, we have been bombarded with a relentless fear campaign meant to push us towards vaccine acceptance. Despite the collaboration between the government and media pushing this hyped message, millions of people have refused to get the shot. This is because there is an abundance of information, which the government is now attacking as disinformation, that shows the shots are not safe and are causing adverse health effects. The contradictory nature and obvious lies surrounding the pandemic surely contributed to the anti-vaccine attitude as well. The CDC, for example, admitted that between March 2020, and March 2021, 94.9 percent of the 540, 677 people who died with Covid died because of other underlying medical conditions, and not because of Covid-19. Despite this admission, and many others like the falsifying of death certificates and paying hospitals to do so, many millions of people still complied with vaccine and mask mandates, telling the government what was or wasn’t effective in their messaging.
According to Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, one of the primary aims of mass media is to “overcome the psychological barriers which prevent the change of attitudes and opinions.” In other words, there is a massive effort currently underway to figure out how to vaccinate the rest of the public by overcoming any resistance which may have developed in response to what the government calls, disinformation. To do this, social researchers are examining various persuasive strategies to understand their effects on people, and why they did or didn’t get the initial vaccine. How are people who have been labeled as vaccine-hesitant processing the message, and how can it be reframed in a way to gain compliance? There have been several studies published discussing how certain social media platforms have been instrumental in forming an anti-vaccine attitude, and how persuasion theories like the Elaboration Likelihood Model, The Extended Parallel Process Model, and Social Judgement Theory, will help researchers overcome these attitudes by studying how people process information. What part of the message are they responding to, and why? Under the Elaboration Likelihood Model, people are categorized as either having high or low elaboration likelihood. This means they are either thinking deeply about the message being presented to them, or simply responding to it due to emotional triggers within the message, or some other cue like celebrity endorsement, for example. These are referred to as the central and peripheral routes of persuasion. The central route is based on cognitive theory, meaning people generally display a high level of thinking; or stimulus-response theory, which suggests they do not. It has been shown that people in the high elaboration category are more likely, after having thought about the message through their cognitive efforts, to adopt longer-lasting attitude changes. This applies to people who are sitting on the sidelines and do not have strong attitudes towards the subject in the first place. People who have been paying attention to the inconsistencies and outright lies about COVID-19 are not easily persuaded. The EPPM deals with how people process fear messages based on their perceptions of how the threat will affect them. If the threat of contracting COVID-19, for example, is perceived as being high, under this model, people automatically resort to protective behaviors. If they do not perceive it as a threat, they will most likely not adopt the recommended interventions. Under Social Judgement Theory, people are believed to respond to messaging based on how it aligns with their pre-existing values and beliefs. For example, if an individual is someone who regularly gets a flu shot because they are afraid of getting sick, they would be considered more likely to comply with the COVID-19 vaccine. If an individual was skeptical of the government, less likely.
One study, published in the Journal of Health Communications called COVID-19 Vaccine Discourse on Twitter: A Content Analysis of Persuasion Techniques, Sentiment, and Mis/Disinformation, examines the use of these persuasive communication theories contributing to the anti-vaccine attitude on social media platforms like Twitter, for example, so that these attitudes can be overcome, and more people could be persuaded to accept the vaccine. They examined the use of these strategies under three different vaccine sentiments – pro-vaccine, anti-vaccine or neutral. The primary aim, however, was to understand how these persuasion strategies allegedly led to anti-vaccine sentiments. As is the case with Marxism in general, the researchers are accusing the anti-vaccine side of using the same tactics they use. These persuasion theories were largely employed to gain vaccine compliance in the first place. Throughout the duration of the so-called pandemic, we were bombarded with constant fear messaging meant to induce us into compliance with mask and vaccine mandates. In fact, people who refused to get vaccinated were demonized, and the propaganda term “the pandemic of the unvaccinated” was pushed for weeks in an effort to gain further compliance. This term is clearly meant to influence people based on fear and uncertainty, yet, The Journal of Health Communications insists that the anti-vaccine movement was using this tactic by formulating their messages using the Elaboration Likelihood Model’s peripheral processing route of persuasion. This is where people are believed to accept persuasive messaging based on an emotional trigger, initial credibility, celebrity endorsement of the message, or any other cue that simply elicits a response. These people, according to the ELM, fall into the low elaboration category. Using Social Judgement Theory, researchers suggested that social media messages endorsing conspiracy theories about DNA changing properties of the vaccine, and negative side effects were very influential in forming anti-vaccine attitudes. This is despite the FDA admitting that the vaccine poses a severe risk of myocarditis. They also claim that the issue of free choice was used as an anti-vax persuasion strategy and employer-mandated vaccines were framed as being against an individual’s free choice. Employer-mandated vaccines were an idea published by The New England Journal of Medicine in October 2020. They wrote that employer mandates would alleviate any constitutional “due process” issues that may come with legally attempting to force the vaccine on the population. They can claim that framing the issue as one of free choice is a fear tactic, but it is one that was based in reality as many millions of people were forced to either get vaccinated or lose their jobs.
The reason they conduct these studies is so they better understand the attitudes and beliefs of the anti-vax movement so they can develop their own persuasive strategies, using the theories mentioned above, to target anti-vaccine sentiment. They are accusing those holding the anti-vax position of using fear-based messaging to influence attitudes against the vaccine, while at the same time, in their own paper, suggesting that “health communicators” should adopt strong fear-based messaging to affect greater behavioral change.
“Understanding Threat and Efficacy in messaging is particularly
salient to promote vaccine adoption. Health communicators
should consider combining strong fear appeals with high-efficacy messages, which can result in the greatest behavior
change (Witte & Allen, 2000). However, when utilizing fear
appears, it is imperative to educate the public on how disinformation may try to elicit negative emotions and prey on fears,
a strategy that can help inoculate individuals from such messaging.” (Skannell et al, 2021)
To put that quote into greater perspective, they are advocating the use of fear-based messaging while also including the idea that messages contradicting their own are made to induce fear and promote misinformation. Throughout the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic, messages were pushed onto the public that were designed to influence our behavior and push us into compliance. Behavioral health models like The Health Belief Model were used to gauge the public’s perceptions of the severity of COVID-19 and the likelihood that the targeted populations would adopt the recommended interventions based on those perceptions. The public must come to understand the nature of propaganda involves studying the public’s attitudes and opinions and framing the issues in ways that reflect these attitudes back to the people to shift their attitudes one way or the other. As the book Media, Propaganda, and Persuasion so eloquently states, “To make the unruly public more productive and orderly, publicists first need to discover what the public thinks and feels.” Be ready America, it is highly likely we are about to experience a very aggressive propaganda campaign that is going to build off everything they have learned about gaining our compliance over the past three years. Whenever we comply, we are also showing them how they got us to do it.
