Wayne Hsiung: Why cover-ups backfire
With modern communications technology, it’s far easier to achieve the critical mass necessary to overcome efforts to suppress. It’s one of the reasons that the gestation crate cover-up, and the ag-gag laws, have not worked as the industry hoped.
WAYNE HSIUNG: The Utah Court of Appeal denied our petition to review a lower court order that prohibits the presentation of animal cruelty evidence at our September trial. That trial, which relates to an investigation and open rescue at the largest pig farm in the nation, has likely generated more attention than any animal rights story of the last decade. (Over 130,000 people shared it on Facebook alone including 6,000 from the author’s post.) And there was one overriding reason for the case’s reach: it was a classic cover-up story, and cover-ups nearly always backfire…
Smithfield Foods, the largest pig farming corporation in the world, has undertaken extraordinary efforts to conceal what happens in its facilities. And the company’s attempt to gag us at trial, like its prior efforts, is likely to be counterproductive. There are at least three reasons, grounded in the science of social change, why cover-ups fail…
Cover-up #1: The false promise of “crate-free” farming
In Jan 2007, Smithfield made a historic promise to phase out, within 10 years, the use of so-called gestation crates… As documented by investigations we performed from 2017-2018, the company was lying. They were continuing to use gestation crates in direct violation of their promise. The cover-up has now generated national media attention and is the subject of litigation by the Humane Society of the United States…
Cover-up #2: The “Ag-Gag” laws
In 2012, Smithfield Foods and other large corporations in Utah… pushed the state of Utah to criminalize photography at factory farms. Their efforts, which directly contradicted the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech, were initially a great success; ag-gag laws passed across the nation… But as with gestation crates, the Ag-Gag effort backfired. A Republican judge struck down the law in Utah as a violation of the First Amendment, and drafted a resounding opinion in defense of not just free speech, but also animal advocates. Numerous other laws suffered a similar fate…
Cover-up #3: The prosecutions of ‘open rescue’
And then there is the most recent effort: the targeting of grassroots investigators and rescue activists. Open rescue, which uses the power of nonviolence and transparency to directly challenge systems of abuse, has been one of the most powerful tactics in animal rights history… In the mid 2000s… the passage of the notorious Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act… made some forms of nonviolent animal activism punishable as “terrorism” felonies under federal law…
In 2014, DxE launched a systemic effort to build a global network for open rescue despite these threats. I spoke at universities across the country and even at events sponsored by more “mainstream” nonprofit organizations, such as Farm Sanctuary, about the moral and legal imperative to rescue animals. And the results were inspiring: hundreds of people across the globe began walking openly into factory farms to rescue animals from abuse…
“It’s not the crime. It’s the cover-up.”
The failure of cover-ups has practically become a point of conventional wisdom in American politics… But why is that the case? There are three important reasons, grounded in social and psychological research, why cover-ups are so counterproductive.
The first reason is the principle of scarcity, as first illustrated by psychologist Robert Cialdini… Cover-ups, by definition, create a perception of scarcity. There is information that is being denied to the public, making its availability limited… By attempting to gag animal advocates, however, the industry has merely made this information even more compelling to the public.
The second reason that cover-ups backfire is that they provide a perfect structure for a compelling story: a huge challenge. Yuval Noah Hariri, the tech industry’s philosopher of choice, has described myth-making as central to our species… Cover-ups create just this sort of challenge. The overriding problem with most social movements is not opposition but apathy. Cover-ups ironically help us overcome that problem with a powerful narrative of individuals speaking out despite efforts to silence them. This is not just hypothetical, in the case of DxE. All of our most powerful content, in terms of both the number of people reached and the impact of our message, have been related to our battles with an oppressive industry and government…
The third reason for the failure of cover-ups is that they trigger the most powerful emotion of protest: anger… The reason is that it denies respect for another person’s right to choose their future, by attempting to manipulate them with false beliefs. This manipulation inevitably creates outrage and anger, which is perhaps the central emotion of protest. Cover-ups, by creating outrage and anger, provide the fuel for this protest. Even individuals who might not otherwise feel much about the underlying misconduct are motivated to protest when they’ve been lied to…
The good news is that, with modern communications technology, it’s far easier for us to achieve the critical mass necessary to overcome the efforts to suppress. It’s one of the reasons that the gestation crate cover-up, and the ag-gag laws, have not worked as the industry hoped. There were enough people out there in the world, amplifying the message by sharing blogs like this one, that our movement could survive the headwinds. As our trial approaches in September, I’m confident we’ll have the same support. Thanks to every one of you for being a part of that. SOURCE…
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