Philosopher David Freeborn says independent research is being funded by big business in order to distract the public and policymakers from the potential harms of their products.
LONDON – Even the truth can be manipulated to deliberately deceive us.
That’s the argument put forward by Northeastern University philosopher David Freeborn in his recent paper, “Industrial Decentralization.”
The assistant professor’s research, to be published in the journal Philosophy of Science in January, explores when big business, corporations and trade bodies fund and share research that is accurate and of high quality, but is nevertheless intended to deceive.
Freeborn, along with his co-author Caitlin O’Connor of UC Irvine, cite the example of Coca-Cola investing in research that investigated the health benefits of exercise and its impact on weight and diet-related diseases.
The soft drinks giant helped fund the Global Energy Balance Network, a US-based non-profit organization that was criticized for highlighting the link between obesity and lack of physical exercise.
The two philosophers argue that while Coca-Cola was investing in independent research, the aim was a “distraction” – to divert the public and policymakers from the idea of sugary drinks and poor diet being a major factor in high obesity rates. , and instead blame it on a sedentary lifestyle.
The tobacco industry is another sector that has engaged in the practice of industrial distraction, according to Freeborn’s letter, spending “huge resources sowing doubt about the link between smoking and diseases such as lung cancer and emphysema.”
The industry “promoted research into alternative causes of lung disease, including exposure to asbestos, air pollution, coal smoke and even early marriage,” Freeborn and O’Connor write.
Freeborn, who teaches at Northeastern’s London campus, says the concept of industrial distraction calls into question how misinformation should be defined.
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“There’s an issue that people usually think of disinformation as something that’s false — disinformation that’s intentionally false,” he says.
“What we were interested in is this idea that sometimes you can have misleading content. It can be scientifically robust, it can be done by good scientists who follow all the principles of good scientific practice – and yet it can be misleading. So in that sense, it kind of blurs the lines of what counts as misinformation.”
And with various industries seeking to protect their interests, the result is competing and counterproductive research that can make it confusing for consumers to decide how best to protect their health, Freeborn describes.
“The sugar case is interesting because you had Coca-Cola, through the Global Energy Balance Network, trying to fund research into lifestyle factors [being a cause of obesity],” says Freeborn.
“You’ve also had the dairy industry – the butter and egg industry in Britain – trying to fund research suggesting that sugar is the main driver of obesity. So you had different industry groups funding selective research, in each case trying to push a particular agenda, and the result was just confusion and distraction, which made it very unclear.”
Freeborn also makes the argument that some examples of industrial distraction go much further than simply trying to sow confusion. Tobacco industry funding for asbestos research has had the “good effect” of “increasing our understanding of the harms of asbestos”, he says, but it was done in the full knowledge that smoking itself can cause lung cancer and other diseases. others.
“The tobacco industry knew about the research that showed the dangers of smoking,” Freeborn adds, “yet they were funding other sources, knowing it would distract people. I think this is a real case of fraud. complete.”
The document lays out guardrails to protect the public against industrial distraction, including industry funding for segregated research through a lottery system and requiring companies to declare the harm their products cause when publishing the results of the science they financially support.
Freeborn acknowledges that there are no perfect solutions while scientific research continues to rely on industry funding.
“I don’t think we want to say that any of these solutions are going to be a panacea that’s going to completely fix this because it’s a deep-rooted issue,” he continues.
“It is difficult to identify because in many cases it is a legitimate search. And it’s hard to address without throwing away industry funding for research altogether, which, unless we get to a place where all research is publicly funded—which we’re not—then that’s not going to happen, and many fields of science need industrial research.”
