A favorite tactic of U.S. corporations looking to dismantle consumer protection reforms (or anything they don’t like, really) is to create entirely fake consumer groups custom-built to confuse voters and journalists. Such groups are usually used in combination with think tanks and other pseudo-objective organizations to muddy the waters, confuse constituents, and mislead the press when it comes to reform.
Cable giant Charter, for example, recently created a fake consumer group in Maine specifically tasked with lying to locals about the benefits of community-owned broadband efforts. AT&T funds more than a dozen different think tanks, all tasked with trying to convince the public and policymakers that dismantling U.S. corporate oversight will somehow result in effervescently efficient “free markets.”
The goal is to create a sound wall of fake pseudo-academic and public support against what are usually broadly popular reforms (basic corporate oversight, expanded use of solar, community owned broadband, more competition, whatever).
These tactics have been a cornerstone of cable, broadband, and telecom giants for years. But it’s also a the backbone of major energy companies’ in their efforts to undermine renewable energy reforms. Like in 2016, when a major Florida utility was caught using a fake consumer group it made up — combined with a “free market” think tank it funds — to derail efforts to ramp up solar use.
Utilities were caught again in 2023 creating fake consumer groups in Eugene, Oregon to try and derail the city’s efforts to ramp up the use of more efficient heat pumps. And now ProPublica tells the tale of yet another group of fossil fuel companies that are using fake local news orgs, think tanks, and fake consumer groups to undermine efforts to deploy solar across Ohio.
The fossil fuel industry was opposed to efforts to build a large solar farm in Knox County, Ohio. So to undermine the efforts, they began seeding local news outlets with criticism of the project, a lot of it coming from fake consumer groups like “Knox Smart Development,” developed by Ariel Corporation to spread lies about the effort to the local populace:
“The man who registered the group as a business — and who is its sole member and spokesperson — was an Ariel Corporation employee two decades ago and remained an acquaintance of a top executive there, Tom Rastin. The group’s website was owned for a time by a woman working as an executive assistant at Ariel.
And one of Knox Smart Development’s larger funders is Rastin, a Republican megadonor and a retired executive vice president at Ariel, according to records and sworn testimony. Rastin’s father-in-law founded Ariel and, until recently, Rastin and his wife, Karen Buchwald Wright, led the company. Wright is still the chairman, and her son operates it now. Rastin and Wright did not respond to questions for this story.”
Read the whole ProPublica story when you have a moment. It really explains in wonderful detail how this sort of modern sleazy influence effort works.
Telecom and energy giants gleefully exploit the slow death of local journalism, usually replacing it with a variety of pseudo-news gibberish mostly focused on propping up corporate interests. They then use these fake consumer groups to seed fake (or just lazy and understaffed) local news orgs with all manner of misleading bullshit designed to undermine anything they don’t like.
In a lot of areas, like in Knox County, local news outlets are being replaced with so-called “pink slime” fake local newspapers. A large chunk of them (including the ones involved in this story) are being financed and orchestrated by a company called “Metric Media,” which ProPublica describes as such:
“Metric Media’s nonprofit arm has received $1.4 million “for general operations” from DonorsTrust, a dark-money group that has received significant funding from Charles and David Koch, who made their billions in oil pipelines and refineries. The eight-company network that Metric is part of also has ties to conservative billionaires, including oil-and-gas-industry titan Tim Dunn, shipping magnate Richard Uihlein and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.”
So at the same time you’ve got a fake consumer group seeding the fake local press with fake arguments about a project, you’ve got think tanks (pretending to be objective academic enterprises) also peppering local policymakers with the same arguments. At the same time, companies hire K Street firms to hammer regulators with a lot of fake comments from fake (and sometimes even dead!) people, opposing reform.
These groups all work to stock local meetings with misinformed locals, pepper the region with misleading ads and fliers, and generally saturate a community with corporatist bullshit.
In addition to lobbying local, state, and federal officials, this can all be done relatively inexpensively, and if you hadn’t noticed, it’s very effective. Policy and government folks don’t seem to have the slightest interest in reining in any of it (with transparency laws, campaign finance reform, or much of anything else), so this kind of influence just continues — and continues to get steadily worse.
On the plus side, genuine local support for popular reforms can still overpower these kinds of sleazy efforts (like in community broadband, where local anger at Comcast or Charter often outshines any effort to mislead locals), but it’s indisputable that this kind of sleazy gamesmanship makes implementing even basic progress and reform much, much harder and time consuming than it has to be.