It's well-documented that the West has long used false propaganda to sway public opinion.

Western military and intelligence services manipulate social media to counter criticism of Western policies.

Such manipulation includes flooding social media with comments supporting the government and large corporations, using armies of sock puppets, i.e. fake social media identities. See this, this, this, this and this.

In 2013, the American Congress repealed the formal ban against the deployment of propaganda against U.S. citizens living on American soil. So there's even less to constrain propaganda than before.

Information warfare for propaganda purposes also includes:

The Pentagon, Federal Reserve and other government entities using software to track discussion of political issues … to try to nip dissent in the bud before it goes viral

"Controlling, infiltrating, manipulating and warping" online discourse

Use of artificial intelligence programs to try to predict how people will react to propaganda

Automated Propaganda

Some of the propaganda is spread by software programs.

We pointed out 6 years ago that people were writing scripts to censor hard-hitting information from social media.

One of America's top cyber-propagandists – former high-level military information officer Joel Harding – wrote in December: