The hidden price of manufactured reality

The headlines that stirred your emotions, viral videos that confirmed your suspicions, social media posts that fuelled your outrage and even conversations dominating your timelines were carefully designed by people whose greatest weapon was not a gun or a ballot paper but a story.

It sounds like the plot of a political thriller. Yet it is increasingly becoming the reality of our digital age. Recently, Forbidden Stories published an investigation in which a former propagandist in the Central African Republic described the inner workings of organised disinformation campaigns. The revelations were unsettling, not because propaganda is new but because they exposed how sophisticated, systematic and industrialised the business of influencing public opinion has become.