FUD: How Propaganda & Marketing Targets Your Fears

Introduction: What is FUD?

FUD is a propaganda tactic used across a wide range of contexts, including marketing, public relations, politics, cults, and more. FUD is an acronym for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Sometimes the D is used for disinformation instead of doubt, especially more prevalent in contemporary times and concerning the rise of AI and the widespread adoption of the internet. This text explores what that means, with a focus on propaganda and its importance in marketing. A similar concept, in specific regard to public policy, is manufactured uncertainty, which involves deliberate and often exaggerated rhetoric to cast doubt on things like academic findings or misrepresenting statistics to further an ideological or political goal. Another similar concept is manufactured controversy, where a contrived disagreement is designed to create public confusion, steer opinions or gain monetary or ideological profits. 

FUD is generally used to steer people’s opinions about competitors towards negativity. Political candidates use FUD to undermine the policies of their competitors, and companies use it to steer customers towards their own products. There are many examples of FUD in both marketing and politics that highlight the use of FUD to discredit opposition. We’re going to be looking more in-depth at some of them, as well as discussing tactics to avoid and discern FUD. These propaganda ploys may be difficult to spot and are often disguised as critiques, which appeal to the more critically minded. The term FUD is ironically used sometimes as a way to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt - and today is perhaps more associated with techbros trying to dismiss criticism of cryptocurrencies and other contemporary technologies. Labelling criticism as attempts of FUD is in itself a FUD tactic. 

Another common use of FUD today is in concerns of conspiracy, where both establishments and anti-establishment groups deploy the tactic to undermine the other. Manufacturing uncertainty about the claims of both sides. Environmental groups use it to spread fear about policies related to environmental questions, and companies use it to spread uncertainty about the legitimacy of such groups. In the post-modern age we live in, any claim can be refuted and reaffirmed in the span of seconds on the internet, and FUD remains an important tactic used by all players who have a desire to change public opinion.  

FUD as a term has been used since the 1920s and is still used today. It rose in popularity with the rise of the computer hardware industry, and to this day remains ingrained in technology-related topics and marketing. Partially because of the term’s association with the company Microsoft, which in the 90s had several controversies, including the use of anti-competitive practices like spreading vaporware, making competitors’ software unusable on their OS, and a healthy dose of FUD, of course. Supposedly, the tech giant generated false error codes on competing products using Windows, making them seem like unreliable pieces of software and was also accused of funding lawsuits against competitors to sway public opinion. FUD, however, is older than computers, and the example we’re going to be looking deeper at is the tobacco industry, which set the precedent for FUD and perhaps is the origin of the term’s association with disputing academia and scientific research. 

The Tobacco Disinformation Playbook

The term tobacco industry playbook, also called the tobacco industry disinformation playbook, refers to the tobacco industry’s public relations strategy in the 1950s, which they deployed to save face against mounting evidence of links between tobacco smoking and serious illnesses like cancer. Perhaps they learned their tricks from the oil industry in the 1920s, which used FUD to support the use of the dangerous compound tetraethyllead, which is highly toxic but was used as a fuel additive by the oil industry to save money by mixing it with gasoline. These tactics are still employed by other industries today, like the fossil fuel industry, even using some of the same PR firms and researchers as both the oil industry and the tobacco industry did. 

Much of this playbook is known from industry documents made public by whistleblowers or as a result of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. The settlement was between four of the largest US tobacco companies at the time and attorneys general of 46 different states and was reached in 1998. In the mid-1990s, more than 40 states commenced litigation against the tobacco industry on the basis that cigarettes produced by the tobacco industry contributed to health problems among the population, which in turn resulted in high costs to the states’ public health systems. Simply summarised: “You caused the health crisis, you pay for it”. The state alleged a wide range of deceptive, fraudulent and manipulative practices by the tobacco industry over decades of sales. 

The terms of this settlement included several noteworthy conditions, including restricted advertising, sponsorship, and lobbying, especially if these activities were seen as targeting youth. Disbanding three specific “tobacco-related organisations”, including the Tobacco Institute, the Center for Indoor Air Research, and the Council for Tobacco Research. Another part of these terms was, of course, to generally make available to the public the documents disclosed during the discovery phase of the litigation. These documents are made available and archived on the internet to this day, funded and maintained by the Truth Initiative. These documents reveal the fierce tactics used by the Tobacco industry and how they mastered FUD. One 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”. 

At the beginning of the 1950s, research on the potential harmful side of tobacco had some big breakthroughs, especially through research in the UK, which firmly established tobacco smoke as a harmful carcinogen. This led to Reader’s Digest publishing an article by Christian Herald titled “Cancer by the Carton”. In response, the US tobacco executives, along with John Hill, of public relations company Hill & Knowlton, held a crisis meeting and eventually published the article “A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers”, which was a historic first in marketing and was created to socially engineer public’s perceptions of tobacco and to instill doubt about the scientific research linking disease and smoking. The article was published under the organisation “Tobacco Industry Research Committee” to give it some legitimacy. This is but one of many tactics included in the “playbook”. Other tactics include, but are not limited to:

• Astroturfing: fabricating, or directly or indirectly funding, “front groups” to act on industry interests. Entities of this kind are often deceptively named and may claim to represent grassroots opinions. 
• Attacking and intimidating scientists who publish “unfavourable results” through threats to funding, promotion, reputation and more. 
• Fabricating or falsifying scientific research, and presenting it as legitimate research, e.g using flawed methodologies that skew results and selectively publishing favourable results. 
• Manufacture FUD by claiming there is uncertainty about the accepted scientific consensus, through actions like funding “junk science” to undermine scientific consensus and repeating debunked claims. 
• Using affiliations with prestigious academic or professional organisations to influence research.
• Political lobbying to influence policies and governmental decision-making.
• Resisting public regulation and emphasising industry self-regulation and personal responsibility. 

Using FUD, the tobacco industry realised that to keep selling their product to people, they didn’t need to convince people that it’s good to smoke, but just make them doubt how bad smoking could be. FUD is best when you already have people on your side, and if they’re already sceptical, really a lot of FUD relies on personal bias. People are already doubting things that do not align with their own beliefs, and all you have to do is reinforce that doubt often through dubious tricks and misrepresenting the opposition. 

The tobacco industry set the industry standard for FUD, and following in its footsteps are Big Tech and the Oil Industry, who still to this day deploy FUD as a marketing and propaganda tool. Even e-cigarette companies and the like use FUD to shut down criticism and misrepresent scientific research in response to health concerns. 

The Present & Future of FUD

The fear aspect of FUD is to make people afraid about what the opposition is telling them, and paints a grim picture of what could come to pass if they have their will through. The EU has recently, through centrist and right-wing parties, been able to take several steps back in policymaking to lower European companies’ regulations and allow them to self-regulate. As of writing now, in about two weeks, there will be a new proposed bill to let pesticide testing be a once-and-done kind of deal. Whereas previously, testing, especially new pesticides have had to be continuously tested and reevaluated to ensure health and safety is appraised properly, with this new bill, companies will be allowed to do one test, whose “license” will last indefinitely. Making it easier for companies to misrepresent and present fraudulent tests. Ursula von der Leyen and her pack of bandits will get this policy and several others in regards to market and company regulations through by using FUD. 

The picture they’ve painted is the “competitiveness” of the EU, and with it have brought fear into politicians, stakeholders and taxpayers. The fear portrayed is that the EU will lose financial competitiveness and its wealth to other countries like China, India, the US and Russia if these policies don’t pass. They’ve repeatedly, since they’ve gotten power in the EU parliamen,t pushed for the fear that Europe is lagging behind the rest of the world, and that the future will be disastrous if they don’t make these policy changes, which only benefit the monetary gain of big companies and their stakeholders, and may present dire consequences for the people of Europe. Already, flags have been raised about concerns regarding health, safety, work conditions, environment and much more. 

The central force of FUD is uncertainty, and this is perhaps the most powerful and easiest target of the tactic. Uncertainty is easy to plant, and it appeals to people already critical of something, and it inherently confirms personal bias. This also leads into the third and final part of FUD - doubt or disinformation. Using false information is a great way to sow uncertainty, and sometimes you don’t have to debate your opponent, you can just block out their concerns with noise, making the audience uncertain of what they’re hearing. Sometimes, overwhelming is enough to make a person uncertain, and what better than the mass social media we enjoy now? You can drown out critics and reason through a flood of disinformation and appeal to fear rather than reason. On a daily people are bombarded with contradicting information, and that’s enough to make people uncertain, and when uncertainty comes crawling, we often default to our own biases. 

Final question then: how do we avoid being controlled by FUD? 

It’s a tough question, and perhaps it’s not completely possible, and the answers may seem generic and obvious. The antithesis to Fear, Uncertainty and Disinformation is, of course, Fortitude, Assurance and Truth - FAT.  

FUD isn’t going away anytime soon; it remains one of the most prevalent and effective propaganda tactics. In order not to be influenced by FUD tactics, we have to avoid being ruled by fear. That takes a certain kind of fortitude. Fortitude is a resilience adorned with patience and reason. It’s both trusting and confident; it doesn’t give leeway and knee-jerk reactions to fear. It’s using the finer mental faculties of man and grounding them in an emotional state which is stoic and resilient towards anxieties and fear. 

To combat uncertainty, you have to be assured, not to the extent that you see no other paths than your own, but to not become flooded and swayed by an abundance of information. It’s being diligent and being confident in your own truth that you can listen to others without taking on their beliefs. It’s speaking up against falsehood and not engaging with the bait at all. If you don’t have a plan, someone else has a plan for you. 

Finally, to fight doubt and disinformation, you only really need Truth. The truth is always one thing, and we often think that people have different truths, and that’s not true. We have many things, opinions, ideas, feelings and much more, but Truth is always one thing, and it can certainly be separate from what we think it is. 

So it’s simple, right - we remain FAT and FUD can’t affect us? Perhaps, or maybe this whole text was a psyop to make you uncertain what to think, to influence your opinion. Or maybe sow some doubt in your head. Maybe FUD isn’t bad, maybe it’s just something to proclaim the next time someone says something you don’t agree with. You might already be all-knowing and filled with Fortitude, Assurance and Truth. Staying informed isn’t easy, and it can even be detrimental; staying up to date inherently influences you with FUD. But fear no evil, and be certain that this information is, without a doubt, helpful. 

“Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” - John 14:6