# media

Affect Heuristic

When your feelings about something shape what you believe to be true about it.

Appeal to Common Sense

Using 'it's just common sense' as a substitute for evidence or argument, treating intuition as self-evident truth.

Manipulation Tactic

Astroturfing

Creating the appearance of widespread grassroots support for a position when the support is manufactured, funded, or coordinated from above.

Backfire Effect

When correcting someone's false belief makes them believe it even more strongly.

Cultural Influence

Bread and Circuses

Keeping a population content through entertainment and material comfort so they don't question the systems they live under.

Compassion Fatigue

When constant exposure to suffering erodes your ability to care, not because you're heartless but because you're human.

Competitive Victimhood

The tendency for groups in conflict to compete over who has suffered more, using their pain to claim moral authority and deflect accountability.

Euphemism

Softening harsh realities with gentler language - sometimes kindly, sometimes to hide the truth.

False Balance

Presenting two sides as equally valid when the evidence overwhelmingly supports one.

Illusory Truth Effect

Repeat something often enough and people start to believe it - not because it's true, but because it's familiar.

In-Group/Out-Group Bias

The tendency to favour people in your own group and view those outside it with suspicion, distrust, or hostility.

Loaded Language

Words chosen to trigger an emotional reaction rather than communicate neutral information.

Logical Fallacy

Loaded Question

A question that contains a built-in assumption, making it impossible to answer without appearing to accept that assumption.

Naive Realism

The belief that you see the world as it objectively is - and that anyone who disagrees must be biased, uninformed, or irrational.

Negativity Bias

The tendency for negative experiences, information, and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones.

Political Theory

Spiral of Silence

The tendency for people to stay silent when they believe their opinion is in the minority, causing that opinion to seem even rarer than it is.

Streisand Effect

When attempting to suppress, censor, or hide information backfires by drawing far more attention to it than it would have received otherwise.

Symbolic Racism

When prejudice hides behind the language of fairness - opposing policies that help marginalised groups while insisting the opposition isn't racial.

Cultural Influence

The Culture Industry

When culture is mass-produced to pacify rather than challenge, turning art and entertainment into instruments of conformity.

Cultural Influence

The Spectacle

When life is experienced through images and representations rather than lived directly.

Weasel Words

Vague qualifiers that create the impression of a meaningful claim while committing to nothing.