Fighting Fire with Facts: Detecting, Decoding, and Dismantling Online Propaganda
摘要
Fighting propaganda requires moving beyond analysis to systematic intervention strategies that protect democratic criminal justice discourse. This chapter provides practical approaches for detecting and dismantling visual propaganda in criminal justice contexts, offering concrete tools for criminologists, practitioners, and policymakers. The chapter demonstrates how to apply semiotic analysis to decode symbolic manipulation in crime-related content, develops multi-modal frameworks for analysing how visual, textual, and audio elements work together in propaganda campaigns, and presents AI-enhanced detection systems for identifying manipulative content at scale. The analysis examines platform-specific counter-strategies for social media environments, suggests training curricula for criminal justice personnel to recognise propaganda techniques, and emphasises the importance of community education programmes that build critical thinking skills. The chapter concludes by presenting policy frameworks for counter-propaganda implementation while protecting democratic discourse and equipping readers with methods for building institutional resistance to information manipulation.