Blog Post 9

One tactic commonly used to try and thwart social movements from achieving their goals is counter-persuasion. Counter-persuasion is discrediting leaders, members, and demands when it is not possible to simply ignore the movement’s advances. When making a movement seem unreliable, institutions will often manipulate information to make it seem like the social movement is wrong and fighting for a cause that does not need the attention of the public. For example, the ALF, or Animal Liberation Front, attempts to get people to stand up and fight for any instance in which humans are exploiting an animal for profit. Many institutions including the media have tried to stop backing of the ALF by labeling or framing them as eco-terrorists. The ALF does use some extreme methods to get their point across, however they should not be labeled as terrorists by institutions that are misusing animals as severely as the entities this group targets. It is easy for institutions to use counter-persuasion in the fight against the ALF because there is little scientific or statistical informative information involving how many animals are truly being mistreated, and even less evidence of the extreme mistreatment of the animals occurring behind the scene. Without very much concrete evidence it is easy to for institutions to write the ALF as terrorists in the media.

            As previously stated, the media has made it a point to frame the Animal Liberation Front as a terrorist organization. With rhetorical artifacts such as this the media, which is doing the bidding of institutions who oppose the ALF, is trying to get people to rally against the advancement of this social movement. This is not to say the information is completely fabricated however, it is intended to instill a feeling of ill intent when the general public think about the ALF. The ALF is not a completely radical group of animal activists, but the organization does have a few extremists who institutions focus their counter-persuasion efforts on.