Thread by @thewalrus

Stay tuned for a Twitter takeover by @Djr100Daniel talking about his book Cigarette Nation: Business, Health, and Canadian Smokers, 1930–1975. thewalrus.ca/how-big-tobacc… 1/18

Hey everyone! This is Daniel Robinson, and I’m here to tell you about how a coordinated program of public deception, which spanned four decades, has become a template for modern disinformation.
thewalrus.ca/how-big-tobacc… 2/18

For most of the twentieth century, cigarette smoking prevailed in restaurants, doctors’ offices, workplaces, and countless public and private spaces. In 1950, six in ten Canadians smoked cigarettes, which were touted for enhancing sociability and psychological well-being. 3/18

So, my book asks, how did smokers react to the news, in the 1950s, that cigarettes caused lung cancer? How did the tobacco industry respond? 4/18

ome smokers, mostly older men, managed to quit, but most carried on, and lots of new smokers joined their ranks. For decades, smokers downplayed tobacco-cancer science and saw their own mode of smoking as less risky. 5/18

Smokers engaged in what psychologists call “motivated reasoning,” developing arguments and justifications to minimize the health risks of cigarettes. (For instance, many smokers reasoned that they were more likely to die from a car crash than from cigarettes.) 6/18

The industry promoted this thinking with a strategy of hope and doubt. 7/18

Hope came in the form of health-reassurance marketing, e.g., light/mild brands, which smokers thought were safer. As they adopted “safer” cigarettes with less tar and nicotine, they unwittingly smoked more, negating any marginal benefits. 8/18

Smoking-and-cancer awareness created marketing opportunities for cigarette makers, accelerating market segmentation as women and upper-income groups opted for low-yield and light/mild brands. 9/18

While many of these smokers would later die from cancer, the cruel irony is that the “cancer scare” breathed new life—and marketing innovation—into a cigarette industry that had been stagnating for decades. 10/18

Alongside this marketing, the industry promoted doubt with a forty-year disinformation campaign that attacked the science linking cigarettes to cancer and other diseases. 11/18

Tobacco executives dismissed epidemiological smoking studies as “statistical” and not properly clinical or experimental; they claimed instead that air pollution or viruses accounted for growing rates of lung cancer. 12/18

The industry’s program of public deception evoked state propaganda (or even Orwell’s Ministry of Truth) more than it did typical PR promotion. 13/18

The industry did not aim to change minds on an issue for which legitimate debate was possible. It worked to eradicate the basis for knowing what constituted empirical fact and expert knowledge. 14/18

The effect was to diminish smokers’ capacity to evaluate risk, weigh evidence, and make informed decisions. 15/18

Buttressing this denialist doctrine was a form of industry Newspeak that deployed terms like “medical controversy,” “benefits of smoking,” and “freedom of choice” to drown out discourse on lung cancer and heart disease. 16/18

The tobacco strategy became the template for oil-industry attacks on climate science. As @NaomiOreskes writes in Merchants of Doubt, scientist-for-hire allies of the tobacco industry pivoted in the 1980s to “fight the facts and merchandise doubt” about global warming. 17/18

That’s it from me, Daniel Robinson. Thanks to @thewalrus for sharing their Twitter account! You can read an excerpt from my book here: thewalrus.ca/how-big-tobacc… 18/18