Fear, uncertainty, and doubt


Fear, uncertainty, and doubt is a manipulative propaganda tactic used in technology sales, marketing, public relations, politics, polling, and cults. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and is a manifestation of the appeal to fear.
In public policy, a similar concept has been referred to as manufactured uncertainty, which involves casting doubt on academic findings, exaggerating their claimed imperfections. A manufactured controversy is a contrived disagreement, typically motivated by profit or ideology, designed to create public confusion concerning an issue about which there is no substantial academic dispute.

Etymology

The similar formulation "doubts, fears, and uncertainties" first appeared in 1693. The phrase "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" first appeared in the 1920s. It is also sometimes rendered as "fear, uncertainty, and disinformation".
By 1975, "FUD" was appearing in contexts of marketing, sales, and in public relations:
FUD was first used with its common current technology-related meaning by Gene Amdahl in 1975, after he left IBM to found Amdahl Corp.
This usage of FUD to describe disinformation in the computer hardware industry is said to have led to subsequent popularization of the term.
As Eric S. Raymond wrote:
By spreading questionable information about the drawbacks of less well-known products, an established company can discourage decision-makers from choosing those products over its own, regardless of the relative technical merits. This is a recognized phenomenon, epitomized by the traditional axiom of purchasing agents that "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment". The aim is to have IT departments buy software they know to be technically inferior because upper management is more likely to recognize the brand.

Examples

Public policy

Manufacturing controversy has been a tactic used by ideological and corporate groups to "neutralize the influence of academic scientists" in public policy debates. Cherry picking of favorable data and sympathetic experts, aggrandizement of uncertainties within theoretical models, and false balance in media reporting contribute to the generation of FUD. Alan D. Attie describes its process as "to amplify uncertainties, cherry-pick experts, attack individual scientists, marginalize the traditional role of distinguished scientific bodies and get the media to report "both sides" of a manufactured controversy."
Those manufacturing uncertainty may label academic research as "junk science" and use a variety of tactics designed to stall and increase the expense of the distribution of sound scientific information. Delay tactics are also used to slow the implementation of regulations and public warnings in response to previously undiscovered health risks. Chief among these stalling tactics is generating scientific uncertainty, "no matter how powerful or conclusive the evidence", to prevent regulation.
Another tactic used to manufacture controversy is to cast the scientific community as intolerant of dissent and conspiratorially aligned with industries or sociopolitical movements that quash challenges to conventional wisdom. This form of manufactured controversy has been used by environmentalist advocacy groups, religious challengers of the theory of evolution, and opponents of global warming legislation.
Ideas that have been labeled as manufactured uncertainty include:

Legal effects

In the United States, the generation of manufactured uncertainty about scientific data has affected political and legal proceedings in many different areas. The Data Quality Act and the Supreme Court's Daubert standard have been cited as tools used by those manufacturing controversy to obfuscate scientific consensus.
Concerns have been raised regarding the conflicts of interest inherent in many types of industry regulation. For example, many industries, such as the pharmaceutical industry, are a major source of funding for the research necessary to achieve government regulatory approval for their product. In developing regulations, agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency rely heavily on unpublished studies from industry sources that have not been peer reviewed. This can allow a given industry control over the extent of available research, and the pace at which it is reviewable, when challenging scientific research that may threaten their business interests.

Software producers

Microsoft

In the 1990s, the term became most often associated with Microsoft. Roger Irwin said:
In 1996, Caldera, Inc. accused Microsoft of several anti-competitive practices, including issuing vaporware announcements, creating FUD, and excluding competitors from participating in beta-test programs to destroy competition in the DOS market.
In 1991, Microsoft released a beta version of Windows 3.1 whose AARD code would display a vaguely unnerving error message when the user ran it on the DR DOS 6.0 operating system instead of Microsoft-written OSs:
If the user chose to press, Windows would continue to run on DR DOS without problems. Speculation that this code was meant to create doubts about DR DOS's compatibility and thereby destroy the product's reputation was confirmed years later by internal Microsoft memos published as part of the United States v. Microsoft antitrust case. At one point, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates sent a memo to a number of employees, reading
Microsoft Senior Vice President Brad Silverberg later sent another memo, stating
In 2000, Microsoft settled the lawsuit out-of-court for an undisclosed sum, which in 2009 was revealed to be $280 million.
At around the same time, the leaked internal Microsoft "Halloween documents" stated "Open source|OSS is long-term credible… FUD tactics cannot be used to combat it."
Open source software, and the Linux community in particular, are widely perceived as frequent targets of Microsoft's FUD:
The SCO Group's 2003 lawsuit against IBM, funded by Microsoft, claiming $5 billion in intellectual property infringements by the free software community, is an example of FUD, according to IBM, which argued in its counterclaim that SCO was spreading "fear, uncertainty, and doubt".
Magistrate Judge Brooke C. Wells wrote in her order limiting SCO's claims: "The court finds SCO's arguments unpersuasive. SCO's arguments are akin to SCO telling IBM, 'sorry, we are not going to tell you what you did wrong because you already know...' SCO was required to disclose in detail what it feels IBM misappropriated... the court finds it inexcusable that SCO is... not placing all the details on the table. Certainly if an individual were stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that 'you know what you stole, I'm not telling.' Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus' entire inventory and say 'it's in there somewhere, you figure it out.
Regarding the matter, Darl Charles McBride, President and CEO of SCO, made the following statements:
  1. "IBM has taken our valuable trade secrets and given them away to Linux,"
  2. "We're finding... cases where there is line-by-line code in the Linux kernel that is matching up to our UnixWare code"
  3. "...unless more companies start licensing SCO's property... may also sue Linus Torvalds... for patent infringement."
  4. "Both companies have shifted liability to the customer and then taunted us to sue them."
  5. "We have the ability to go to users with lawsuits and we will if we have to, 'It would be within SCO Group's rights to order every copy of AIX destroyed
  6. "As of Friday, June , we will be done trying to talk to IBM, and we will be talking directly to its customers and going in and auditing them. IBM no longer has the authority to sell or distribute IBM AIX and customers no longer have the right to use AIX software"
  7. "If you just drag this out in a typical litigation path, where it takes years and years to settle anything, and in the meantime you have all this uncertainty clouding over the market..."
  8. "Users are running systems that have basically pirated software inside, or stolen software inside of their systems, they have liability."
SCO stock skyrocketed from under a share to over in a matter of weeks in 2003. It later dropped to around —then crashed to under 50 cents on 13 August 2007, in the aftermath of a ruling that Novell owns the UNIX copyrights.