Organizations shield harmful policies through disguised proxy front groups

Evidence

Moral disengagement operates at each of the three types of agency. In moral disengagement at the individual level of agency, individuals try to sanitize and sanctify detrimental activities that are within their sphere of control and shift the responsibility for the activities elsewhere in the chain of command. Proxy agency is widely used by organizations to shield themselves from controversial policies they promote, usually through proxy front groups masquerading as the independent, grassroots voice of the general public. Their mission is disguised under a misleading title with no disclosure of their sponsors. Critics call such pseudo grassroots Astroturf and refer to stealth industry proxies as Astroturfers. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 131

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s existing claims about ordinary people rationalizing harmful policy: proxy front groups let individuals support Islamophobic policy through organizations bearing the moral weight.
• SEED: The Astroturf mechanism is an angle for explaining how policy harm is psychological distanced — citizens support ‘grassroots’ campaigns that are industry-proxy operations.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 131