INSERM’s Anti-Fake News Campaign

In October 2025, an advertising campaign by INSERM against “health fake news” illustrates, in my view, the dead ends of public communication that, by reproducing propaganda techniques—even when done ironically—betrays its goals of critical education and fuels the very distrust it claims to combat.

The Predetermined Failure of Moralizing Campaigns

The history of public health campaigns should have taught us this lesson. Malcolm Gladwell, in “The Tipping Point” (2000), demonstrated the absolute failure of moralizing strategies in smoking prevention. Analyzing several decades of anti-tobacco policies, he notes that “few public health initiatives have failed as miserably as programs attempting to convince young people to give up cigarettes.” The figures are eloquent: from 1993 to 1997, the proportion of smokers in American universities rose from 22.3% to 28.5%. From 1991 to 1997, it increased by 32%. Since 1988, the number of smokers among American teenagers has increased by 73%.

Why this failure? Gladwell identifies a fundamental error: these campaigns mobilize “adult arguments.” He writes: “It is useless to warn teenagers about the risks of tobacco, concludes Judith Harris. It will make you impotent! You can die from it! This is adult propaganda; these are adult arguments. It is because adults disapprove of smoking—because it is dangerous and frowned upon—that teenagers are so attached to it.” The lesson is clear: the more one adopts a moralizing and anxiety-inducing tone, the more one reinforces the transgressive appeal of the behavior one seeks to combat.

Gladwell proposes a radically different strategy: rather than confronting smoking head-on with fear-based messages, one should act on the “stickiness factors” (depression, nicotine tolerance threshold) that transform experimentation into addiction. He writes:

"We must stop fighting this kind of experimentation. We must instead accept it and even account for it.
[…]
Rather than trying vainly to oppose experimentation, it would be better to ensure that experimentation does not have serious consequences."

Propaganda, Daughter of Democracy, Not Its Enemy

To understand what is at stake in this INSERM campaign, we must deconstruct the received idea that propaganda is the preserve of authoritarian regimes. David Colon, in “Propaganda: Mass Manipulation in the Contemporary World” (2019), establishes an unequivocal historical observation:

Propaganda is the daughter of democracy.
[…]
Propaganda is therefore not the preserve of authoritarian regimes, and even less the opposite of democracy. Not only was propaganda born in democratic regimes, but it was long perceived positively there. The word “propaganda” had no pejorative connotation in liberal democracies before the 1970s.

Even more troubling, David Colon demonstrates that propaganda primarily affects the most educated populations: “It is only toward a man who is no longer totally obsessed with poverty that evolved propaganda can work” and “for a man to be propagandized, he must have reached a minimum of culture.” Far from protecting against manipulation, access to abundant information instead creates a need for simplifying interpretive frameworks. Colon writes:

The great strength of propaganda is precisely to give modern man these global, simple explanations, these massive and doctrinal causes without which he cannot live amid the flood of information.

Modern propaganda does not rely primarily on lies but on the manipulation of verified facts. “When propaganda tells the ’truth,’” writes Colon, “the individual then becomes convinced that it is no longer propaganda, and that moreover the great self-confidence thus expressed makes the man more vulnerable to unconscious attacks.” By presenting partial truths within an oriented interpretive framework, propaganda is more effective than pure lies, which are more easily exposed.

INSERM, or the Repetition of Historical Errors

INSERM’s campaign reproduces exactly the errors identified by Malcolm Gladwell. Against a morbid black background, with its imperative slogan “WARNING HEALTH FAKE NEWS” followed by “KEEP YOUR DISTANCE,” it mobilizes fear and authoritarian injunction. The message is anxiety-inducing in its form (“For your health, surround yourself with reliable sources. FAKE NEWS IS A PUBLIC DANGER”) and infantilizing in its content: citizens are ordered not to believe “this” but to unconditionally believe “that,” without being given the tools for autonomous critical thinking.

The CEO of INSERM, Didier Samuel, justifies this approach by invoking “the scourge” of disinformation and “the decline in trust accorded by the French to science.” But this strategy, in my view, and following Gladwell and Colon, only worsens the problem it claims to solve. Those who have experienced in their own lives the benefits of alternative medical practices, even if partly due to the placebo effect, will see in this brutal disqualification a contempt for their lived experience, a negation of their own intelligence and critical thinking, and ultimately a confirmation that “the State lies.” Far from restoring trust, this approach reinforces the conviction that official scientific institutions serve interests other than public health. This approach, therefore, further discredits “Science” by making it appear univocal, when science is nothing but research and controversy, agreements and disagreements.

Even more troubling: the campaign uses exactly the techniques it claims to denounce, employing irony but in an extremely clumsy and malicious way. INSERM created “fake miracle products” (Revigorator, Slimizer, Bye-bye Depress’) installed in a vending machine at a Parisian train station to “challenge” and “gather reactions from passersby.” The communications agency Insign assumes this strategy: “our approach was inspired by the very mechanisms that make fake news successful: their power of attraction and their virality.” So manipulation is fought with manipulation, deceptive staging with deceptive staging, “current codes” with those same codes. The campaign deliberately adopts a “surprising register,” in other words, it plays on emotion and spectacle rather than reason and argumentation. In short, by trying to reach people, it sinks into what it believes it is denouncing; it disqualifies intelligence and autonomous critical distance; it infantilizes, manipulates, and lies. Health is not a game, and this campaign turns it into a game of power and dupes.

Solutionism Against Solutionism

What is also striking about this campaign is that it never escapes the paradigm of solutionism. INSERM rightly denounces the “miracle products” of the agri-food industry or social media influencers. But it does so to promote other “solutions” stamped by the state apparatus and the pharmaceutical industry! We remain trapped in the same schema: on one side the “good” solutions (ours, validated by legitimate authority) and on the other the “bad” solutions (theirs, promoted by illegitimate sources, foreign to central power).

Yet, as Evgeny Morozov (2013) analyzed in “To Save Everything, Click Here”, solutionism is this ideology that reduces complex problems to technical and commercial solutions. The medical solutionism of which INSERM makes itself the herald presents the pharmaceutical industry and the biomedical health system as the very incarnation of health and “science,” erasing all critical distance between an economic system and the well-being it claims to defend. Ivan Illich warned as early as 1975 in “Medical Nemesis” about this “social iatrogenesis”: the industrial medical system ends up harming health by creating pathological dependence on technical solutions. And this is absolutely absent from this INSERM campaign.

Nowhere in this campaign does the invitation appear to build one’s own critical judgment, to understand that each physiological and existential terrain is different, that what suits one may not suit another. On the contrary, the message is: “Don’t think, obey. Consult the sources we validate.” This is banking education, to use Paulo Freire’s term (1970), which pours out ready-made truths instead of developing critical consciousness—that is, an instrument of domination rather than a tool of emancipation.

Science Transformed into State Religion

This campaign contravenes the fundamental principles of secularism. As a state organization, INSERM does not merely present scientific information: it disqualifies and despises beliefs that do not correspond to official orthodoxy. By considering science as a revealed truth guaranteed by the State rather than as a perpetually revisable process of inquiry, it transforms it into a state religion.

Karl Popper in “Conjectures and Refutations” (1963) established that science is distinguished precisely by its refutability, its provisional character, its capacity to question itself. To present “science” as the holder of a definitive truth guaranteed by the State is to slide into scientism, this ideology that sacralizes science instead of practicing it. George Orwell had prophesied in “1984” (1949) this appropriation of truth by the State: the Ministry of Truth can say anything and its opposite, and it will always be “the truth” as long as the State decides so.

The Covid-19 crisis perfectly illustrated this mechanism. The French State issued contradictory recommendations—on masks, on treatments, on transmission, on the duration of immunity, etc.—while labeling as “conspiracy theorists” those who expressed any doubt whatsoever about official messages and orders. A few months later, what these “conspiracy theorists” announced became the official position—this was almost always the case for two years. It is precisely on this crisis that INSERM relies to justify its current campaign, without ever questioning the responsibility of institutions in the loss of confidence it deplores. The campaign presents vaccines as having been attacked by disinformation, without mentioning that the accumulation of successive doses precisely demonstrated the gap between initial promises and actual effectiveness, and that these vaccines never protected against virus transmission, contrary to what was stated in official messages—confirming in many people’s minds that the pharmaceutical industry had presented a misleading “miracle product.”

Divide and Rule: Destructive Social Effects

The effects of this campaign are, in my view, also socially destructive. It produces radicalization between two camps opposing each other in a war of beliefs. On one side, those who, out of fear or reflex submission to symbolic authority, adhere to the official discourse. On the other, those whose lived experience contradicts this discourse and who see in it confirmation that the State seeks to manipulate them. This division weakens the social fabric, particularly within families and among friends—one of the most damaging aspects of the Covid crisis.

Gladwell shows in “The Tipping Point” how prevention campaigns can be counterproductive when they adopt a moralizing tone: “The most effective anti-tobacco campaigns have never been those that infantilized smokers, but those that provided them with nuanced information allowing them to make their own informed choices.” The black background of the INSERM campaign, its morbid aesthetic, its imperative tone belong to anxiety-inducing communication that worsens collective psychological distress. Claiming to defend public health while generating anxiety and social division is a performative contradiction.

INSERM explicitly positions itself as the “leading national health research organization” that “helps citizens sort between what they can believe—because based on solid scientific foundations—and what can be dangerous for their health.” This approach reveals that the objective is not citizens’ well-being or the development of their critical thinking, but their conformity to the injunctions of power. We are facing a true “Ministry of Truth” that decides what is permissible to believe in matters of health.

The Colonial Contempt for Non-Orthodox Knowledge

Beyond infantilization, this campaign conveys a colonial contempt for non-Western knowledge. By dismissively disqualifying all alternative approaches, it implicitly asserts the superiority of Western biomedicine over all other therapeutic traditions. This epistemological arrogance has been analyzed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos in “Epistemologies of the South” (2014): the West arrogates to itself the monopoly on valid knowledge and reduces to the rank of superstitions the millennial knowledge of other cultures—Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic, African, indigenous, etc.

This symbolic violence defends pharmaceutical capitalism, the commodification of health, the dispossession of popular and traditional knowledge in favor of a globalized industry. The “white-coated white experts” dictate to populations what they must believe, how they must care for their bodies, without any consideration for the diversity of relationships to the body, illness, and healing. As Paulo Freire (1970) reminds us, one always gains by considering people as intelligent, capable of reflection, rather than as “fools” who need to be protected from themselves.

Edward Bernays had theorized in “Propaganda” (1928) how the control of public opinion works through the creation of conditioned reflexes rather than through education in reasoning. This campaign reproduces exactly these mechanisms: it appeals to emotion (the anxiety-inducing black background, the evocation of danger), to the argument from authority (the state label), and to binary simplification (good sources versus bad sources). Michel Foucault (1976) showed in “The Will to Knowledge” how modern biopower operates through the management of populations via health discourses. This campaign is a perfect illustration of this.

For a True Health Education

This campaign is, in my view, dangerous because it undermines the democratic foundations of our society. It replaces education in critical thinking with obedience to authority; it transforms science into dogma; it divides society between believers and heretics; it infantilizes citizens instead of developing their autonomy. Far from protecting public health, it weakens it by generating distrust, anxiety, and radicalization.

A true public health policy respectful of democracy and secularism should develop citizens’ critical capacities, present complexity rather than simplify, respect the plurality of therapeutic approaches, and above all never claim to hold definitive truth. Health is not decreed from above through moralizing campaigns; it is built with people, respecting their intelligence, their lived experience, their beliefs.

This type of communication should be prohibited in a truly secular State. It constitutes symbolic state violence, hate speech disguised as health benevolence. As David Colon writes, “modern propaganda is not limited to the dissemination of ideas, but also aims to make individuals adopt a determined opinion and conduct.” Rather than seeking to impose an orthodoxy, public institutions should support citizens in developing their critical thinking, provide them with tools for discernment, and respect their ability to make their own choices regarding health. That would be true health democracy.