Would You Fall For This Propaganda?
The latest wave of deinfluenza is more than a trend detox — it’s a reckoning with how prevalent spin is and how everything IS that deep (and how it can get exhausting).
What’s Going On?
At first, it looked like the latest in deinfluencing: through March and April, TikTokers posted lists titled “Things I can’t ever be influenced into” – generally trend-related goods (think: Labubus, which have their own article coming up).
But over the past week or so, the format morphed into something sharper – still lists, but now under the headline “Propaganda I’m not falling for,” covering everything from “climbing the corporate ladder” to preventative Botox, Colleen Hoover, and even ChatGPT.
What’s Driving It?
analyzed the recurrent topics featured on these miniature reckonings over on TikTok – in addition to what I’ve called out above, matcha, hustle culture, oat milk (but also dairy), and the clean-girl aesthetic are all leading propaganda.They’re connected less by category than by vibe: aspirational items and belief structures that now feel sus. And, at least on my side of the algorithm, they overlap with topics often flagged as “alt-right pipelines.”
Now I’ve written before about how I’m skeptical of the “everything is fascist” / “everything is an alt-right pipeline“ school of critique. BUT creators like
(who came on my radar with her “Why your favorite aesthetic is fascist” series) genuinely help people interrogate the ideologies buried inside aspiration. Behind the attention-grabbing hook, her nuanced takes encourage conscious cultural consumption – less “everything is evil,” more “let’s talk about what this signals.”What Does It Mean?
Ultimately, calling out “propaganda” has become shorthand for:
“This thing claims to be harmless, but it reflects a whole belief system I don’t trust.”
People are tired of being sold things, including ideas, disguised as empowering (or even just neutral), and are calling it out through this adaptable meme-like wrapper. But that adaptability comes at a cost: one person’s propaganda is another’s undeniable truth.
And the algorithm tailors these callouts to our existing beliefs. I might get served feminist critiques of girlboss culture as propaganda – others get posts in the same structure but underwritten by a completely different ideology, for example saying that Berlin and pronouns (but also girlboss culture) are propaganda.
Final Takeaway
We’re getting better at spotting spin and questioning once-accepted truths. The harder part is deciding what to actually believe when everything seems to have an agenda.