Editing The Disinformation Playbook

The Disinformation Playbook

How Business Interests Deceive, Misinform, and Buy Influence at the Expense of Public Health and Safety

Published Oct 10, 2017 Updated May 18, 2018

Science helps keep us safe and healthy. The public safeguards that keep our drinking water clean and our children's toys safe rely on independent science and a transparent policymaking process. And we all rely on scientific information to make informed choices about everything from what we eat to what consumer products we buy for our families.
Activist Resource
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Stopping the Disinformation Playbook
Too often, companies use the Disinformation Playbook to make public policy work for them, instead of for all of us. But the Playbook is not unstoppable—and it's time to push back.

But the results of independent science don’t always shine a favorable light on corporate products and practices. In response, some corporations manipulate science and scientists to distort the truth about the dangers of their products, using a set of tactics made famous decades ago by the tobacco industry. We call these tactics the Disinformation Playbook.

To be clear: most companies don’t engage in disinformation. The deceptive practices that make up the Playbook are used by a small minority of companies—and yet, as we show, they are found across a broad range of industries, from fossil fuels to professional sports.

Here are five of the most widely used “plays” and some of the many cases where they have been used to block regulations or minimize corporate liability, often with frightening effectiveness—and disastrous repercussions on public health and safety.

==The Fake==

[[File:Play-fake.png|center|Conduct counterfeit science and try to pass it off as legitimate research]]
'''''Conduct counterfeit science and try to pass it off as legitimate research'''''

Companies underwrite a good deal of scientific research, and society often benefits from it. But bonafide scientific research demands a high degree of scientific integrity to ensure that results derive from the evidence, and not from a desire to meet a predetermined, non-scientific objective. People who have a financial stake in research outcomes should not publish in scientific journals without full and clear disclosure of conflicts of interest—especially when the results involve the safety or effectiveness of a company’s products.

To evade these standards, some companies choose to manufacture counterfeit science—planting ghostwritten articles in legitimate scientific journals, selectively publishing positive results while underreporting negative results, or commissioning scientific studies with flawed methodologies biased toward predetermined results. These methods undermine the scientific process—and as our case studies show, they can have serious public health and safety consequences.