About FRAME

Why we built this

Propaganda works best when nobody notices it. A 1915 recruiting poster and this week's wave of coordinated accounts lean on the same few moves: a fear, a flag, a crowd that seems to agree, an enemy with a face. Once you can name those moves, they lose much of their grip.

It is easy to spot propaganda from the other side and miss it from your own. So FRAME catalogues how a message works, not whose message it is, and applies the same tags, the same evidence standard and the same scrutiny to every country, party, movement and era. It takes no position on the causes behind the material it holds.

We also wanted the past and the present in one room. A wartime poster shows a technique plainly, with a century of distance. The watch briefs show the same technique still running today, faster and at larger scale. Seeing them side by side is the quickest way we know to learn the pattern.

So FRAME is built to be checked. Every image is public domain or openly licensed, every brief cites dated sources, and thin evidence is labelled as thin. It is free to read and free to reuse.

The rules

Score methods, not teams. A technique is a technique regardless of faction, and an archive that only studies the other side is itself a stacked deck. The same standard applies to every side, country and era, including the ones a reader may agree with. FRAME is a record, not an argument: it describes how a message works and leaves judgments about the cause behind it to the reader. Quotes are never invented. Sources are primary and dated wherever possible, and a thin record is labelled as thin.

Showing the record as it was

Propaganda was often cruel, racist, violent or sexualized, and some of it is hard to look at today. That does not change the fact that it was made and seen. FRAME shows every object complete and unedited, because a cleaned-up version would misrepresent what people were actually shown and what the technique relied on. Showing an object is not endorsing it.

Who this is for. FRAME is meant for readers 18 or older, or younger readers with a parent's or guardian's approval and supervision. Much of the material is extremely offensive and will offend people. Read the terms of use and the privacy policy.

Objects with dehumanizing, violent or graphic imagery carry a short content note above them, so readers know what is coming. The note never replaces or hides the object.