THE PROPAGANDA PLAYBOOK
UNTIL ELECTION DAY
PLAYBOOK
PHASES
RECEIPTS CHECK
QUESTIONS
PROPAGANDA
CYCLE
ELECTION
PROTECTION
We’re living through a perpetual propaganda storm.
AI-generated media, weakened safeguards, and engagement-driven platforms have transformed the information environment.
This playbook helps communities, journalists, and creators prepare, respond, and recover.
PHASE 01
Recognize manufactured narratives. Spot coordinated framing designed to look organic. Identify cynicism bombing. Understand who benefits.
The Receipts Check is a three-question protocol that you use on any breaking content involving individuals, organizations, or communities before your network amplifies it.
Trace the content to its origin. Find the actual post on the actual account. Pull the primary source directly and confirm the content exists in its original context and says what the circulating post claims it says. In a crisis or propaganda moment, the source is often the only thing that can be independently confirmed when everything else moves too fast to verify.
Manufactured content sequences emotion before evidence: outrage, despair, shame, urgency, etc demanding immediate action. Legitimate coverage delivers verified facts first and emotional weight follows from them. Content that reverses that sequence warrants a pause before it travels through your network.
Timing is always information. A scandal dropping 72 hours before an election serves a specific operational goal. So does a cluster of attacks targeting the same family across social platforms. Each piece may be verifiable. Ask whose strategic interest the timing and the pattern serve before your network moves the content.
Does your current reach actually matter?
Stack your amplifiers and validators now. Reach and impact are not the same.
PHASE 02
Own the Infrastructure Your Community Depends On
An email list belongs to you. No algorithm throttles it and no content moderation policy removes it. A creator or organization with 50,000 email subscribers holds a communication channel that platform suppression cannot touch. Start building that list now. Offer your community something valuable enough to give you direct access: a newsletter, early information, exclusive content, community resources.
Spill was built specifically to create a safe, well-moderated space for Black communities online – with intentional algorithm and content moderation design to back that commitment. Download it. Build your presence there. A platform built for your community serves your community’s interests when the larger platforms do not.
Document Your Baseline Before Anyone Can Manufacture a New One
Screenshot and save your follower counts, engagement metrics, and platform analytics monthly. Store them somewhere you control like a personal drive, a secure cloud folder. Build a personal website that tells your story and your background on your terms. When suppression hits, your documented baseline proves it.
Tell your story loud, publicly, on your website and across platforms. Document your partnerships, your program results, and your community relationships before anyone manufactures a different version of them. Make the true narrative about who you are, what you do, and the communities you serve significantly easier to find than any future lie about you.
Build the Network That Moves Truth at Speed and Scale
Build a digital trust map that captures where gaps exist in your reach and rapid response capacity.
Decide in advance who receives the first signal when verified information needs to move, in what format, and through what channel. For example: Black press outlets get the first signal on breaking stories affecting Black communities. Verified content from Black journalists travels through the amplification network before unverified viral content does. These agreements require conversation and commitment now, before a moment of crisis removes the time to have them.
Build What Holds You When the Storm Hits Hardest
Authenticate content, trace origins, and track how false narratives spread.
Document everything first: screenshots, timestamps, threats, suppression, targeting, and other evidence.
Build direct relationships with Black media before you need them. Independent press provides distribution beyond social platforms and algorithms.
Connect with organizations experienced in digital attacks, harassment, civil rights, and coordinated targeting.
The resources above address information threats. The resources below address what happens when a coordinated attack escalates into physical, legal, and digital danger simultaneously. Build these relationships before you need them.
PHASE 03
In a crisis moment, when emotion runs high and content moves fast, these steps limit risk and ensure you remain a credible source for your community.
Our Move: Always Step With Intention
Before anything moves through your network, the Receipt Check should run. Pull the primary source directly. Run InVID/WeVerify on any video. Run Google Reverse Image Search and TinEye on any images. Amplifiers in your network should hold until the content clears.
Your validators and peer organizations from your digital trust map respond publicly. Contact them directly and specifically: name what you need, name the timeline. Simultaneously, call trusted outlets to provide the verified story if applicable. Then distribute through your email list immediately after. If platforms suppress your content during an active attack, your press relationships and owned infrastructure carry the verified story directly to your community.
If the attack targets you directly, activate your resilience network now. NABJ rapid response. PEN America’s Online Harassment Field Manual. Coalition Against Online Violence direct support. These relationships exist in your safety net because building them mid-attack costs time you may not have. If the attack combines legal, physical, and digital threats simultaneously, contact DPN and/or Beacon through your safety net resources in Part 2.
Screenshots. Timestamps. Records of suppression, harassment, and fabrication patterns. Documentation builds the evidentiary record that platform appeals, legal challenges, and future accountability actions depend on. File platform complaints through the EFF and Freedom of the Press Foundation channels. Share what you document with your resilience network so the pattern becomes collective evidence.
Our Move: Know Response Priorities
Don’t give a small threat a bigger audience. Verify first, then match your response to its reach.
When reach is unclear: verify before you amplify.
False information about polling locations, hours, ID rules, mail ballots, deadlines, or drop boxes can directly prevent someone from voting.
Response: Verify immediately, Always Match Response to Reach, and distribute the correction through the appropriate channels.
Verify with:
Keep 1-866-OUR-VOTE circulating throughout the voting period.
Reports or rumors involving armed groups, law enforcement, ICE activity, threats, or voter intimidation can suppress turnout whether the threat is real or fabricated.
Response:
For creators: Urgent-looking warnings can turn your platform into the distribution system for false intimidation. Verify first—even when the intent is to protect your audience.
False narratives targeting civic leaders and organizations can accelerate near elections.
Response:
Your strongest defense is a credible public record built before the attack arrives.
Cynicism bombing uses real frustration to push one conclusion: participation is pointless.
Watch for:
Response: Trace the source, verify the claim, and—when reach is wide—counter with specific, documented information through your trusted network and owned channels.
The primary targets of intimidation theater moving forward.
Creators with large platforms are a primary target of intimidation theater. TREAD CAREFULLY. Fake warnings about armed groups, polling location threats, and ICE activity arrive built to trigger your protective instincts, often from accounts or peers who already believe them. Run the Receipt Check before any election-related threat is amplified on your platform. Read the playbook to learn more.
PHASE 04
THE STORM PASSES. THE WORK REMAINS.
Organize legal support, fundraising, referrals, and long-tail public affirmation.
Keep partners connected. Fund the infrastructure. Document what worked.
R.I.S.E. converts documented harm into four concrete demands: regulate the systems, investigate the harms, shift corporate power, and empower the communities carrying the damage.
REGULATE
INVESTIGATE
SHIFT CORPORATE POWER
EMPOWER COMMUNITIES
Push candidates, state officials, election administrators, and organizations toward four concrete commitments.
During this Cycle
Classify coordinated disinformation targeting Black voters as voter suppression under state law.
Require disclosure or bans on deceptive Al-generated election content.
Fund local Black press and trusted community information networks as election infrastructure.
Build rapid response protocols between election officials and community organizations.
Push federal legislation making racially targeted algorithmic suppression a civil rights violation with private right of action. Build community-controlled information infrastructure that does not depend on the goodwill of the same platforms amplifying
READ THE PLAYBOOK. Recognize the Tactics.
Build trusted channels before the next storm hits.
© 2026 Onyx Impact. All rights reserved. The Propaganda Playbook and all related content, research, graphics, and materials are proprietary and may not be reproduced, distributed, or republished without written permission.
Onyx Impact is a 501(c)(4) nonpartisan nonprofit organization
Their Tactic: Information Manipulation
Coordinated actors manufacture the information environment our communities receive through three distinct techniques, AI fabrication, context extraction, and character destruction. All deliver the same outcome: a version of reality optimized to produce doubt and paralysis before communities and individuals can organize a response.
AI Fabrication
Artificial intelligence produces fabricated audio, video, and images that professional journalists struggle to authenticate under deadline pressure. The fabricated content spreads across platforms in hours. Corrections may take days to reach a fraction of the same audience.
In 2026 this could look like: A manufactured video of a candidate admitting to voter fraud. A fake audio clip of a civil rights director endorsing voter suppression legislation. A synthetically generated image of a polling location closing early in a majority-Black precinct. Each costs almost nothing to produce.
Context Extraction
Context extraction deploys real content–genuine grief, documented injustice, verified outrage – as a weapon by removing everything that gives it meaning. The pain in the original content is real but the story constructed around it is fabricated.
In practice this looks like: A video of police violence filmed three years ago in a different city circulates as breaking news the week before a local election. A Black creator’s commentary on economic hardship gets clipped, stripped of its argument, and reposted by accounts whose entire purpose is manufacturing despair. These accounts require no fabrication budget. Platform algorithms reward the amplification of pain, so the technique costs nothing beyond the willingness to exploit it.
Character Destruction
Character destruction runs as a coordinated, multi-front campaign that strips a person of their credibility, livelihood, and humanity before the public ever scrutinizes what the state or a powerful actor did to them. It works because it operates across multiple arenas simultaneously, social, professional, legal, etc, creating the appearance of wrongdoing where none exists. When attacks arrive from enough different directions, or with the backing of the state, the conversation shifts from the crime to what the victim “should have done.”
Repetition does the work that evidence cannot. A claim circulated across enough platforms or with the backing of the state acquires the texture of established fact. By the time any remedy or corrective action should occur, the target’s humanity has already been systematically replaced by manufactured narratives.
In 2026 this could look like: A family demanding answers from the state watches coordinated negative reviews hit their business. The same week accounts begin to circulate claims about their character while the family is hit with defamation lawsuits or threats of lawsuits.
