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Fear, uncertainty, and doubt

Tactic used to influence opinion From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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"FUD" and "FUDD" redirect here. For other uses, see Fud and Fudd (disambiguation).

Fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) is a manipulative propaganda tactic used in technology sales, marketing, public relations, politics, polling, and cults. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and is a manifestation of the appeal to fear.

In public policy, a similar concept has been referred to as manufactured uncertainty, which involves casting doubt on academic findings, exaggerating their claimed imperfections.[1] A manufactured controversy (sometimes shortened to manufactroversy) is a contrived disagreement, typically motivated by profit or ideology, designed to create public confusion concerning an issue about which there is no substantial academic dispute.[2][3]

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Etymology

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The similar formulation "doubts, fears, and uncertainties" first appeared in 1693.[4][5] The phrase "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" first appeared in the 1920s.[6][7] It is also sometimes rendered as "fear, uncertainty, and disinformation".[8]

By 1975, "FUD" was appearing in contexts of marketing, sales,[9] and in public relations:[10]

One of the messages dealt with is FUD—the fear, uncertainty and doubt on the part of customer and sales person alike that stifles the approach and greeting.[9]

FUD was first used with its common current technology-related meaning by Gene Amdahl in 1975, after he left IBM to found Amdahl Corp.[11]

FUD is the fear, uncertainty and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products.[11]

This usage of FUD to describe disinformation in the computer hardware industry is said to have led to subsequent popularization of the term.[12]

As Eric S. Raymond wrote:[11]

The idea, of course, was to persuade buyers to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. After 1991, the term has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.[11]

By spreading questionable information about the drawbacks of less well-known products, an established company can discourage decision-makers from choosing those products over its own, regardless of the relative technical merits. This is a recognized phenomenon, epitomized by the traditional axiom of purchasing agents that "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment". The aim is to have IT departments buy software they know to be technically inferior because upper management is more likely to recognize the brand.[citation needed]

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Examples

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Public policy

Manufacturing controversy has been a tactic used by ideological and corporate groups to "neutralize the influence of academic scientists" in public policy debates. Cherry picking of favorable data and sympathetic experts, aggrandizement of uncertainties within theoretical models, and false balance in media reporting contribute to the generation of FUD. Alan D. Attie describes its process as "to amplify uncertainties, cherry-pick experts, attack individual scientists, marginalize the traditional role of distinguished scientific bodies and get the media to report "both sides" of a manufactured controversy."[13]

Those manufacturing uncertainty may label academic research as "junk science" and use a variety of tactics designed to stall and increase the expense of the distribution of sound scientific information.[1][14] Delay tactics are also used to slow the implementation of regulations and public warnings in response to previously undiscovered health risks (e.g., the increased risk of Reye's syndrome in children who take aspirin).[14] Chief among these stalling tactics is generating scientific uncertainty, "no matter how powerful or conclusive the evidence",[14] to prevent regulation.

Another tactic used to manufacture controversy is to cast the scientific community as intolerant of dissent and conspiratorially aligned with industries or sociopolitical movements that quash challenges to conventional wisdom.[15] This form of manufactured controversy has been used by environmentalist advocacy groups, religious challengers of the theory of evolution, and opponents of global warming legislation.[16]

Ideas that have been labeled as manufactured uncertainty include:

Tobacco industry

This section is an excerpt from Tobacco industry playbook.[edit]
Thumb
Gift offered by tobacco industry lobbyists to Dutch politician Kartika Liotard in September 2013

The tobacco industry playbook, tobacco strategy or simply disinformation playbook[22][23] describes a strategy used by the tobacco industry in the 1950s to protect revenues in the face of mounting evidence of links between tobacco smoke and serious illnesses, primarily cancer.[24] Such tactics were used even earlier, beginning in the 1920s, by the oil industry to support the use of tetraethyllead in gasoline.[25] They continue to be used by other industries, notably the fossil fuel industry, even using the same PR firms and researchers.[26]

Much of the playbook is known from industry documents made public by whistleblowers or as a result of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. These documents are now curated by the UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents project and are a primary source for much commentary on both the tobacco playbook and its similarities to the tactics used by other industries such as the fossil fuel industry.[26][27]

A 1969 R. J. Reynolds internal memorandum noted, "Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public."[28][29]

In Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented the way that tobacco companies had campaigned over several decades to cast doubt on the scientific evidence of harm caused by their products, and noted the same techniques being used by other industries whose harmful products were targets of regulatory and environmental efforts.[30] This is often linked to climate change denialism promoted by the fossil fuel industry:[31][32] the same tactics were employed by fossil fuel groups such as the American Petroleum Institute to cast doubt on climate science from the 1990s[33] and some of the same PR firms and individuals engaged to claim that tobacco smoking was safe, were later recruited to attack climate science.[34]

In the United States, the generation of manufactured uncertainty about scientific data has affected political and legal proceedings in many different areas. The Data Quality Act and the Supreme Court's Daubert standard have been cited as tools used by those manufacturing controversy to obfuscate scientific consensus.[1][13]

Concerns have been raised regarding the conflicts of interest inherent in many types of industry regulation. For example, many industries, such as the pharmaceutical industry, are a major source of funding for the research necessary to achieve government regulatory approval for their product.[35] In developing regulations, agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency rely heavily on unpublished studies from industry sources that have not been peer reviewed.[21] This can allow a given industry control over the extent of available research, and the pace at which it is reviewable, when challenging scientific research that may threaten their business interests.[citation needed]

Software producers

Microsoft

In the 1990s, the term became most often associated with Microsoft. Roger Irwin said:[36]

Microsoft soon picked up the art of FUD from IBM, and throughout the '80s used FUD as a primary marketing tool, much as IBM had in the previous decade. They ended up out FUD-ing IBM themselves during the OS/2 vs Win3.1 years.

In 1996, Caldera, Inc. accused Microsoft of several anti-competitive practices, including issuing vaporware announcements, creating FUD, and excluding competitors from participating in beta-test programs to destroy competition in the DOS market.[37][38]

In 1991, Microsoft released a beta version of Windows 3.1 whose AARD code would display a vaguely unnerving error message when the user ran it on the DR DOS 6.0 operating system instead of Microsoft-written OSs:[37][39][40][41][42]

Non-Fatal error detected: error #2726
Please contact Windows 3.1 beta support
Press ENTER to exit or C to continue[40][41][42]

If the user chose to press C, Windows would continue to run on DR DOS without problems. Speculation that this code was meant to create doubts about DR DOS's compatibility and thereby destroy the product's reputation[40][41] was confirmed years later by internal Microsoft memos published as part of the United States v. Microsoft antitrust case.[43] At one point, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates sent a memo to a number of employees, reading

You never sent me a response on the question of what things an app would do that would make it run with MS-DOS and not run with DR-DOS. Is there [a] feature they have that might get in our way?[37][44]

Microsoft Senior Vice President Brad Silverberg later sent another memo, stating

What the [user] is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS.[37][44]

In 2000, Microsoft settled the lawsuit out-of-court for an undisclosed sum, which in 2009 was revealed to be $280 million.[45][46][47][48]

At around the same time, the leaked internal Microsoft "Halloween documents" stated "OSS [Open Source Software] is long-term credible… [therefore] FUD tactics cannot be used to combat it."[49] Open source software, and the Linux community in particular, are widely perceived as frequent targets of Microsoft's FUD:

SCO v. IBM

Main article: SCO v. IBM

The SCO Group's 2003 lawsuit against IBM, funded by Microsoft, claiming $5 billion in intellectual property infringements by the free software community, is an example of FUD, according to IBM, which argued in its counterclaim that SCO was spreading "fear, uncertainty, and doubt".[57]

Magistrate Judge Brooke C. Wells wrote (and Judge Dale Albert Kimball concurred) in her order limiting SCO's claims: "The court finds SCO's arguments unpersuasive. SCO's arguments are akin to SCO telling IBM, 'sorry, we are not going to tell you what you did wrong because you already know...' SCO was required to disclose in detail what it feels IBM misappropriated... the court finds it inexcusable that SCO is... not placing all the details on the table. Certainly if an individual were stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that 'you know what you stole, I'm not telling.' Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus' entire inventory and say 'it's in there somewhere, you figure it out.'"[58]

Regarding the matter, Darl Charles McBride, President and CEO of SCO, made the following statements:

  1. "IBM has taken our valuable trade secrets and given them away to Linux,"
  2. "We're finding... cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code"
  3. "...unless more companies start licensing SCO's property... [SCO] may also sue Linus Torvalds... for patent infringement."
  4. "Both companies [IBM and Red Hat] have shifted liability to the customer and then taunted us to sue them."
  5. "We have the ability to go to users with lawsuits and we will if we have to, 'It would be within SCO Group's rights to order every copy of AIX [IBM's proprietary UNIX] destroyed'"
  6. "As of Friday, [13] June [2003], we will be done trying to talk to IBM, and we will be talking directly to its customers and going in and auditing them. IBM no longer has the authority to sell or distribute IBM AIX and customers no longer have the right to use AIX software"
  7. "If you just drag this out in a typical litigation path, where it takes years and years to settle anything, and in the meantime you have all this uncertainty clouding over the market..."
  8. "Users are running systems that have basically pirated software inside, or stolen software inside of their systems, they have liability."[59]

SCO stock skyrocketed from under US$3 a share to over US$20 in a matter of weeks in 2003. It later dropped to around[60] US$1.2—then crashed to under 50 cents on 13 August 2007, in the aftermath of a ruling that Novell owns the UNIX copyrights.[61]

Apple

Apple's claim that iPhone jailbreaking could potentially allow hackers to crash cell phone towers was described by Fred von Lohmann, a representative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), as a "kind of theoretical threat...more FUD than truth".[62]

Security industry

Main article: Appeal to fear

FUD is widely recognized as a tactic to promote the sale or implementation of security products and measures. It is possible to find pages describing purely artificial problems. Such pages frequently contain links to the demonstrating source code that does not point to any valid location and sometimes even links that "will execute malicious code on your machine regardless of current security software", leading to pages without any executable code.[citation needed]

The drawback to the FUD tactic in this context is that, when the stated or implied threats fail to materialize over time, the customer or decision-maker frequently reacts by withdrawing budgeting or support from future security initiatives.[63]

FUD has also been utilized in technical support scams, which may use fake error messages to scare unwitting computer users, especially the elderly or computer-illiterate, into paying for a supposed fix for a non-existent problem,[64] to avoid being framed for criminal charges such as unpaid taxes, or in extreme cases, false accusations of illegal acts such as child pornography.[65]

Caltex

The FUD tactic was used by Caltex Australia in 2003. According to an internal memo, which was subsequently leaked, they wished to use FUD to destabilize franchisee confidence, and thus get a better deal for Caltex. This memo was used as an example of unconscionable behaviour in a Senate inquiry. Senior management claimed that it was contrary to and did not reflect company principles.[66][67][68]

Clorox

In 2008, Clorox was the subject of both consumer and industry criticism for advertising its Green Works line of allegedly environmentally friendly cleaning products using the slogan, "Finally, Green Works."[69] The slogan implied both that "green" products manufactured by other companies which had been available to consumers prior to the introduction of Clorox's GreenWorks line had all been ineffective, and also that the new GreenWorks line was at least as effective as Clorox's existing product lines. The intention of this slogan and the associated advertising campaign has been interpreted as appealing to consumers' fears that products from companies with less brand recognition are less trustworthy or effective. Critics also pointed out that, despite its representation of GreenWorks products as "green" in the sense of being less harmful to the environment and/or consumers using them, the products contain a number of ingredients advocates of natural products have long campaigned against the use of in household products due to toxicity to humans or their environment.[70] All three implicit claims have been disputed, and some of their elements disproven, by environmental groups, consumer-protection groups, and the industry self-regulatory Better Business Bureau.[71]

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