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Lobbying laundered through nonprofits
What deep lobbying is
Journalist William Greider coined the term while studying how oil companies and tobacco companies funded environmental and health groups, and how drug makers funded patient groups. Nobody would trust Big Tobacco declaring cigarettes safe, so the funding goes to a health group that can say it instead, and the public and legislators are more likely to believe it.
Tech funding and the PTA
Tech companies fund nonprofits that promote computer science, and now AI literacy, along with groups like the PTA. Documents from the attorneys general's trial against Meta showed Meta giving money to the PTA to promote social media safety, a form of brand washing that eases parents' concerns.
The Screenwashing map
Parent groups across the country built a site called Screenwashing, a map of large groups that promote tech in schools. It includes ISTE, the International Society for Tech in Education, and lists every tech company that funds them. The parents want any such nonprofit to disclose its funders every time it is interviewed.
How did tobacco companies use outside groups?
In 1954, the major U.S. cigarette makers created the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, which funded scientists and issued statements questioning the evidence that smoking caused disease. Historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway documented the strategy in their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt. A 1969 internal memo from the tobacco company Brown & Williamson, made public in litigation, described doubt as its product. The committee was renamed the Council for Tobacco Research in 1964 and closed in 1998 under the Master Settlement Agreement.
Why does the messenger change what we believe?
Yale psychologists Carl Hovland and Walter Weiss tested this in a 1951 study. They gave people identical articles attributed to sources of high or low credibility. Participants who read the article from a trusted source were more persuaded than those who read the same text from a source seen as unreliable. The gap in opinion change shrank over several weeks, an effect later called the sleeper effect.
Can the public see who funds a nonprofit?
U.S. nonprofits file an annual Form 990 with the IRS, and the form is public. Donor names listed on its Schedule B are generally withheld from public release. Many nonprofits choose to publish a list of corporate supporters on their own websites.
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