Commercially Determined dedicated March 2026 to unpacking what corporations do to disseminate their preferred policy messages. Last week, we detailed how corporate political activity can manufacture false perceptions of widespread support for industry-friendly positions while simultaneously quieting pro-public voices. We showed that industries also influence how pro-public-interest scientists, advocates, and legislators – who harmful industries see as their opponents – can even engage in policy-making and legal processes.
At the same time, few organizations that could be addressing corporate power and advocating for pro-public-interest policies do so. Yet policymaking is one of the most powerful upstream tools we have to ensure healthier people and planet. After all, in many ways, we have a safer, fairer, and more transparent commercial system than in previous generations thanks to government regulation of business harms.
What you can do
No matter where you sit in the policy making arena— even if you don’t sit there at all, yet— there are things you can do to mitigate the harms yielded by unfair corporate political activity. See our table below with some suggestions if you’re in policymaking, business, media, science, or general community. The rest of this piece will focus on nonprofits and the ways they can claim their policy power to counteract harmful corporate political activity.
How different actors can mitigate harms yielded by unfair corporate political activity
Policymakers | Remember that the loudest arguments do not necessarily indicate genuine widespread support. Strive to take into consideration oversized commercial influence and the fact that the general public, NGOs, and others representing public interests are not going to be as loud. Look at the merits of arguments, interrogate where there is actual evidence, and make decisions in favor of public interest when it is a public interest policy. - Know that when it comes to reducing ill-health and other negative impacts of harmful products, the most effective policies include limiting the advertising, marketing, packaging, accessibility, and availability of those products. |
Business leaders, employees, scholars, lobbyists and PR professionals | Stop normalizing harmful corporate political activities. Strive to work in an ethical way even if laws don’t yet exist and incentives don’t align. Adopt Oberman’s ethical principles for corporate political activity in your work. |
Media Professionals | Do more to cover and expose harmful corporate political activities. |
Scientists | Be highly skeptical of business-funded research work. Fight for strict personal, organizational, and structural conflicts of interest policies at your institutions, journals, and non-peer-reviewed research presentations and publications. The Union of Concerned Scientists has great suggestions for additional ways to act on corporate scientific disinformation that affects policies |
Community members, educators, parents, and youth | Do not engage with corporate educational materials in schools, even if they’re free, especially when it comes to corporate-backed health and environmental education in the realm of harm reduction. These programs are unlikely to be evidence-based. They do, however, normalize harmful products and behaviors, while building the perception that harmful industries are part of the solution to the problems they cause, which garners the political will for pro-industry policies. |
Nonprofit strategies for change
Part of the problem of the uneven playing field between pro-industry and pro-public positions is that many non-profit and other pro-social-change organizations don’t see themselves as political. Some see being involved in policy making as lying entirely outside the scope of their missions. Some even believe they are not allowed to advocate or lobby for policy outcomes affecting their causes.
But, the policy landscape affects all organizations. Many organizations have a lot more leeway to advocate and lobby than they think. And whether they realize it or not, industry regulations affect upstream causes of many of the issues that non-profits try to solve.
By staying on the policy sidelines, many organizations leave political power on the table and leave powerful upstream levers of change untouched.
Here are five concrete actions that pro-social change organizations in the United States can take, all of which are a way to claim political power:
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