The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread

by Cailin O'Connor

In a series of books in the 1920s, including Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928), CPI veteran Edward Bernays synthesized results from the social sciences and psychology to develop a general theory of mass manipulation of public opinion—for political purposes, but also for commerce. Bernays’s postwar work scarcely distinguished between the political and commercial. One of his most famous campaigns was to rebrand cigarettes as “torches of freedom,” a symbol of women’s liberation, with the goal of breaking down social taboos against women’s smoking and thus doubling the market for tobacco products. In 1929, under contract with the American Tobacco Company, makers of Lucky Strike cigarettes, he paid women to smoke while marching in the Easter Sunday Parade in New York. The idea that industry—including tobacco, sugar, corn, healthcare, energy, pest control, firearms, and many others—is engaged in propaganda, far beyond advertising and including influence and information campaigns addressed at manipulating scientific research, legislation, political discourse, and public understanding, can be startling and deeply troubling.