Photoshop

The term names selective omission rather than fabrication, which is what makes it hard to answer. Nothing false has been added, so nothing can be pointed to as untrue, and the story that results is composed entirely of accurate parts. Marsh sets it alongside shunning and trolling as one of the methods by which participation is controlled, which places it with censorship rather than with propaganda. Its scale is what she is interested in. When everyone but western men is drastically underrepresented in every list of important people, the possibility to consider is that everyone else is being photoshopped out of the stories rather than absent from the events, and the systematic version leaves no individual removal that looks wrong. That is the difficulty with the pattern. Each omission is defensible as an editorial judgement about relevance, and only the aggregate shows what has been done. The remedy in her framework is structural rather than corrective. Concentric circles are transparent and permeable so that anyone can review the work and the promotions, and an idea based system promotes ideas rather than people so that the story does not depend on who is judged worth including. Anonymity did something similar in practice, since internet anonymity was for many like emerging from Plato's cave, able for the first time to join every conversation and be treated as an equal for as long as the anonymity held.

Media research studies the same effect under several names, with gatekeeping theory describing selection at each stage of production, agenda setting describing what gets attention and framing describing how it is presented. Symbolic annihilation, Gaye Tuchman's term, names the absence or trivialization of groups in media and is the closest existing concept. Historiography has its own literature on whose lives get recorded. Marsh's usage is narrower and more accusatory than gatekeeping, since it attributes the omission to the writer's bias rather than to institutional routine, and it takes its force from the aggregate evidence rather than from any individual case.