Post-truth, propaganda and the transformation of the spiral of silence

In 2016, post-truth was named word of the year. Since then a handful of texts have sought to further describe and explore the notion, moving beyond the initial definition given by the Oxford Dictionary. This article rejects the term ‘post-truth’, in favour of propaganda, since post-truth tends to be utilized as an evaluative term of contemporary political public discourse, as articulated by specific politicians, predominantly through social media. Taking the field of information management as its starting point, our approach underlines the diachronic character of persuasion efforts through information management, understood as propaganda in the public sphere. As a notion, propaganda, in contrast to post-truth, encapsulates both the diachronic character of information management in the public sphere and the ground-breaking transformation of the process of personal opinion expression, initially described by the spiral of silence model, through the emergence of new interactive media.