Few people seem to have a clear definition of indoctrination, and thus call anything they dislike indoctrination (e.g., "Leftists professors are indoctrinating their students," "Those fundamentalist Christians are indoctrinating their kids," or "Facebook is indoctrinating its users.").

While indoctrination involves pushing a certain opinion, it is also much more. It is the comprehensive effort of passively disseminating a particular viewpoint. The passive aspect is key. People who are indoctrinated with a certain narrative or ideology do not arrive at the intended conclusions through their own thinking, but hear the same thing repeated in a million different ways until they finally take it as unquestionable truth.