Propaganda and Lone-Actor Terrorism

There exists a critical symbiotic relationship between propaganda and lone-actor terrorism. Propaganda relies on the martyrdom of lone-actor terrorists as a symbolic factor in promoting militant political causes. Lone-actors terrorists are attracted, recruited, indoctrinated, radicalized, and operationalized by propaganda. Propaganda is the systematic dissemination of doctrine, rumor, or selected information to promote or injure a particular doctrine, view, or cause. With an exhaustively documented history that extends back many centuries, propaganda can usually be distinguished from other forms of persuasion such as religion, political campaigning, and advertising. “White” propaganda emanates from a known source and is typically neither deceitful nor false, whereas “black” propaganda emanates from an undisclosed source and purports to be the product of the very movement it seeks to undermine. Recently conducted analyses identify a number of legal, psychiatric, economic, personal, and other recognized vulnerabilities of lone-actor terrorists that leave such persons particularly susceptible to targeted propaganda. Propagandists, in turn, have managed—within the past decade in particular—to exploit specific examples of lone-actor terrorism in films, magazine articles, and a variety of internet-based incitements. The relationship between propaganda and lone-actor terrorism can be addressed by removing the causes for this relationship, removing the means of dissemination, imposing internet censorship, employing either “white” or “black” propaganda in response, or simply choosing to ignore this relationship in order to avoid inadvertently amplifying the messages it conveys.