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Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media
- kickout 4y agoNot bad. It's merely a small snippet but it's indicative in tone and implicit in intent.
- diogenescynic 4y agoMonsanto also pays shills to comment positively about pesticide use and try to brow beat anyone who is has a negative opinion their products. It's crazy how aggressive it is. Basically any thread on Twitter or Reddit the same users will defend Monsanto. You see the same thing about other controversial products, such as BPAs. It seems like some tactic they learned from Big Tobacco and Big Oil to just push as much doubt/skepticism as possible to make the public nihilistic/cynical. Meanwhile, most of these products don't even need to be used. We're just letting a few companies pollute the earth and get rich for a minor gain of convenience to the public.
- AtomicOrbital 4y agoCredit must also go to mass purely for max profit agribusiness who just don't care and are too big to fight so responsibility to stuart falls to the enlightened citizens knowing government is toothless
- charcircuit 4y agoWhat strategy do you think they should use instead to correct people spreading misinformation about their company and products. Being a popular brand to hate is not a good pr image.
- nickpeterson 4y agoWhat misinformation?
- charcircuit 4y agoAny kind that it sees.
- nickpeterson 4y agoI’m sorry are you arguing that this is a reasonable course for Monsanto to take? How about they just disclose when products are shown to cause cancer and try to make ones that don’t?
- tptacek 4y agoDo you have an argument ready that people who do not already agree with you about the evils of Monsanto might find persuasive? Your response here is pretty conclusory.
- nickpeterson 4y agoI don’t understand the point you’re making, explain it to me like I’m a complete moron so I don’t misinterpret you.
- tptacek 4y agoThere's an actual controversy over whether Monsanto's best known products are actually harmful to people, especially on balance vs. their substitutes. Your response for how Monsanto should handle this situation seems to be that they should dispose of the controversy and just concede your side of it. That's only persuasive to people that already agree with your side of the argument. Do you have a better one?
- harry8 4y agoSure I'll believe there's an "actual controversy" I don't know any better. What conclusion can be drawn from a company ghostwriting studies and pretending they are not the source of them that support propositions that are convenient to them? Is doing such a thing going to "add to the controversy?" Does the increase in controversy help them in any way? "There are other studies so it is unclear if on balance..." When they are caught out doing so, should we update whatever prior we have about the truth of the proposition that is controversial? Does it make you trust what they say more, or less? Are there any similarities at all to the "smoking causes cancer, heart disease, strokes etc" controversies of the past you can see? Like for example tobacco companies hiring Berkeley's best statisticians to cast doubt on all the studies showing tobacco smoking is quite unhealthy. New statistical techniques were developed to do so and they're good ones still in use! Of course smoking is no longer controversial at all anymore, is it? They did get decades more sales out of "the controversy" and it really was one! Once you catch an organization of any kind with a very, very large ulterior motive in influencing "the controversy" doing so dishonestly, where do you think your prior should be before you see solid evidence to update it for claims that such an organization is making?
- merlinscholz 4y ago
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoSo the issue here is if Monsanto's products were safe, they wouldn't have to pay people to attach their name to company-written articles claiming they are. If you have to buy your support (looking at Google Public Policy team here hard), you probably are not a good company. In short, if Roundup was safe, it's likely there would be studies proving so from scientists not paid by Monsanto to do so. The fact that they have to ghostwrite them means there isn't any legitimate science supporting their position.
- Supermancho 4y ago> So the issue here is if Monsanto's products were safe, they wouldn't have to pay people to attach their name to company-written articles claiming they are. That isn't how scientific evidence has been received by the public and that's blatantly obvious of the last few years. There are plenty of "independent" roundup-is-safe whitepapers, which unsurprisingly, either use large amounts of Monsanto data or Monsanto facilities. Sifting through the details to discount them is quite laborious. There are a scant few "roundup-causes-cancer", which is a consequence of Monsanto monopolizing, sabotaging, or restricting traceable data.
- mike00632 4y agoActually no. Monsanto pays for studies to be done on just one of the active ingredients of RoundUp, not on RoundUp itself. RoundUp has chemicals in it that exist solely to help the active ingredients permeate tissues. Test with only active ingredients and it can appear relatively safe. Test actual RoundUp and it is invariably toxic. That is why there are countless studies showing RoundUp to be toxic and populations who have been negatively affected all while Monsanto publishes an avalanche of paid studies purposefully conducted on a select active ingredient instead of the product itself.
- KennyBlanken 4y agoA couple years ago there was a reddit account that did nothing but pop up like clockwork whenever Mons.anto was mentioned. It cited these ghostwritten studies, claiming that they were proof Gl..ypho-sate was safe. It was so obvious other commenters would poke fun at them and tell other redditors to go look at their comment history.
- shostack 4y agoI'm a marketer, and when I see that sort of thing I have to question why nobody on their social team is seeing it be called out (for the crap that it is) and at the very least says "this is not performing well).
- grapeskin 4y agoA large number of people probably just skim the top 5 comments. For them, seeing an astroturfed “actually X is great and here’s why” comment is enough for them. They’re not digging 8 levels deep into a thread until it’s finally shown that the person is decisively a shill.
- heavyset_go 4y agoIt's this. Normal people might quickly read some comments on Reddit and then go on with their lives without digging into them, building a false consensus in their minds. They never really think to challenge what they read, not because they're dumb or anything like that, but because people only have so much time and energy to put towards critically analyzing what they see online.
- heavyset_go 4y agoThey've probably subcontracted and outsourced some of their reputation management to shitty providers. You see this all the time with SEO and link building, for example.
- vasoolibhai 4y agoWhy did you spell Monsanto as Mons.anto and Glyphosate as Gl..ypho-sate ? Any specific thing you are trying to stay out of ?
- tptacek 4y agoI've defended Monsanto repeatedly on HN (there are some extraordinarily popular beliefs about Monsanto that turn out, from what I can tell, to be just completely false, and they used to wind up here a bunch). I'm not carrying any water for them. I'm pro-GMO just in principle, but neutral-to-skeptical about any company of Monsanto's size. I'm sure the company itself is perfectly amoral. I'm just calling actual issues like I see them. Naturally, plenty of people on HN think I'm a paid shill (what makes this funnier is the company I founded and worked at for most of my time on HN was named "Matasano", which was so frequently confused for "Monsanto" that we put a sign on our window about it in our Mountain View office). My point is just: your intuition for whether comments are paid shillage are likely to mislead you.
- acidburnNSA 4y ago+1 same stuff happens in nuclear power. I spent 15 years getting trained in the field and every time I say something factual on the internet people scream shill. It's nuts.
- epgui 4y ago+1 I’m a biochemist and while I’m not interested in sticking my neck out to defend any company, a lot of the criticism directed at Monsanto is unfair, uninformed and/or unintelligent. This is particularly true of criticism levied against glyphosate (one of the least-bad herbicides I know of) and GMOs (which people are usually just super confused about). Disclaimer: zero conflict of interest, I make all my money building software in the non-bio world.
- raxxorraxor 4y agoIt works because it is finely tuned to appeal to the target demographic. Low confidence users swallow anything that is classified as "privileged information" or painted as such. There are some key topics where this won't work and where PR must lay low. At least for a while. But some sites are a very fruitful ground for that. It will be eaten up by some that too argue for it without having used more than 5 minutes looking into the topic itself. I believe we also have seen this for nuclear power a lot lately.
- fartcannon 4y agoWhy do people work for companies like this? Have they no compassion for their fellow humans?
- pmoriarty 4y agoI ask the same thing about Facebook and Google employees, and people who work for "defense" contractors.
- nickpeterson 4y agoAt least defense contractors can argue they’re helping the “good guys”, people at Facebook know they’re part of the problem but they can’t turn down the money.
- geodel 4y agoHuh, Monsanto employees can claim they are saving millions from hunger and death by providing GMO seeds. Also saving farmers from ruin by providing disease resistant seeds. Now you can come claiming well that's bullshit. But that can again be said for most of the companies.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pstuart 4y agoThe "good guys" are whoever has the money and is favored by the administration.
- heavyset_go 4y agoIt genuinely scares me that so many adults think in terms of "good guys" and "bad guys". One of the things that drove me nuts about the Qanon family of conspiracy theories, despite them being insane, was the rhetoric their followers used, calling the US government "the good guys". First of all, what conspiracy theory actually suggests that the government is on their side and not out to get them, and second, do Q followers think we're in a superhero movie with good guys and bad guys?
- nickpeterson 4y agoI think a more effective strategy might be shaming individuals who make up the company. Just start buying internet ads with a persons name and how they wrote reports to try and convince people something that caused cancer didn’t cause cancer.
- tptacek 4y agoHow's that strategy working out for the antivax movement?
- heavyset_go 4y agoPretty well, I'd assume. Antivax sentiments have never been as widespread and mainstream than they are right now.
- moistly 4y agoCanadians generally (to a supermajority level) dislike the unvaccinated, shun them, and would see them pay a healthcare surtax. Employers don’t want them around. https://nationalpost.com/news/tensions-high-between-vaccinated-and-unvaccinated-in-canada-poll-suggests https://nationalpost.com/news/tensions-high-between-vaccinat... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-poll-shows-majority-of-canadians-support-barring-unvaccinated-from/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-poll-shows-... https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/01/12/canada-poll-unvaccinated-fines/ https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/01/12/canada-poll-unvaccina... https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/majority-of-canadian-small-businesses-plan-to-make-vaccines-mandatory-poll-1.1641960 https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/majority-of-canadian-small-busin... The convoy was despised as well. https://www.cp24.com/news/almost-2-3rds-of-canadians-oppose-trucker-convoy-protest-poll-suggests-1.5772347 https://www.cp24.com/news/almost-2-3rds-of-canadians-oppose-...
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- throwaway042722 4y agoPlease, before you comment how evil Monsanto is, read the Cochrane review of glyphosate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866614/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4866614/ This is produced by the Cochran which "is a British international charitable organisation formed to organise medical research findings to facilitate evidence-based choices about health interventions involving health professionals, patients and policy makers. It includes 53 review groups that are based at research institutions worldwide." (from Wikipedia). Unless you are an expert in the field, you are not likely to do better than a Cochrane systematic review. The review concludes "Thus, a causal relationship has not been established between glyphosate exposure and risk of any type of LHC." (LHC is lymphohematopoietic cancer). I find there are a lot of parallels between anti-GMO and anti-vax: calling it "unnatural", saying it is for mainly for profits by multinational corporations, implying conspiracies to suppress evidence against. Note that also, in the current environment, there is also a lot of money and fame to be gained by being contrarian (especially when you involve trial lawyers). So saying "follow the money" can cut both ways.
- user3939382 4y agoWasn’t there a school groundskeeper who won a lawsuit whose decision was based on it being carcinogenic? If memory serves, he had a lawyer vs a huge team of high priced attorneys who, after a long lawsuit, failed to convince the court. I’m not an expert but courts are designed to adjudicate technical issues like this: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bayer-glyphosate-lawsuit-idUSKCN1N638T https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bayer-glyphosate-lawsuit-...
- tptacek 4y agoCourts are not designed to adjudicate technical issues like this; the conventional wisdom in our separation of powers is that they're uniquely bad at it, which is part of why controversies in upper courts so often devolve to the question of whether fact-finding should be deferred to legislatures instead of court cases.
- user3939382 4y ago
- nsoonhui 4y agoIt's interesting to note that the author, Paul Thacker, is the one who writes about [Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial] (https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635 https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635) at BMJ. [Here](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/53286/214 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/53286/214) is a related question on skeptic SE that tries to verify the claim (which has been closed, unfortunately).
- 99_00 4y agoMajor drug companies wouldn't do this to promote a new drug or deride a patent free alternative.
- 0fcb88 4y agorelated: BY KAVIN SENAPATHY 06.27.2019 "Opinion: I Was Lured Into Monsanto’s GMO Crusade. Here’s What I Learned. As a once-vocal supporter of the company’s GMO push, I learned that debates about science are never just about science." "Crowe (Monsanto) preached a scientific gospel of GMOs that went something like this: If you’re pro-science, you must be pro-GMO. If you’re anti-Monsanto, then you’re anti-GMO. Therefore, if you’re anti-Monsanto, you’re anti-science. His objective, it seemed, was to render opposition to GMOs as ridiculous as belief in Bigfoot, and to amass a movement that could be counted on to shout that message from the rooftops." https://undark.org/2019/06/27/monsanto-gmo-crusade/ https://undark.org/2019/06/27/monsanto-gmo-crusade/
- SemanticStrengh 4y ago