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What do we do when science is deliberately used to mislead? This is the question pursued by Manufacturing Ignorance<\/em>(La fabrique de l’ignorance<\/em>), Franck Cuveillier and Pascal Vasselin’s 2021 French documentary, which speaks openly about a phenomenon now central to a growing number of industrial actors’ strategies: manipulating research in order to delay the spread of knowledge on certain subjects.<\/p>\n The film walks through several textbook cases. Why did it take decades to officially acknowledge that smoking is harmful to health? How is it that a significant share of the population still believes human activity has no impact on climate change? Are neonicotinoid pesticides really responsible for the mass die-off of bees \u2014 or has this, too, been successfully muddied into a question? And why did the official recognition of bisphenol A as an endocrine disruptor result in nothing more than a few timid bans? Behind such cases lie carefully designed campaigns, funded by millions of dollars and euros, stretching from laboratories to social media \u2014 a little-known offensive spanning Europe and the United States, already underway by the 1950s.<\/p>\n Manufacturing Ignorance<\/em> draws on declassified archival documents, graphic animations, and testimonies from experts, lobbyists, and politicians. Guided by philosophers, economists, cognitive scientists, politicians, and agnotologists, it dismantles the mechanisms by which doubt is manufactured \u2014 through the lens of a peculiar discipline, agnotology (“the science of ignorance”), which studies precisely this: how non-knowledge can be strategically produced, and why disinformation dressed in scientific clothing is so effective.<\/p>\n