Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media
disinformationchronicle.substack.com
disinformationchronicle.substack.com
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?
Part of being on top of the pile is taking hits. Comes with the territory, and if can't staff up for it with all your earnings, then tough cookies.
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.
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.
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.
It was so obvious other commenters would poke fun at them and tell other redditors to go look at their comment history.
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.
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.
If you are a biochemist you may have been either a victim or a participant in their campaigns. You should be angry at them if they damage scientific integrity apart from that because it will reflect on anyone working in that field.
Here is the multi billion dollar company trying to influence reporting but this comment from a random redditor is wrong and a bit unfair? I don't get the incentive to even mention that.
The previous commenters are talking about the criticism of GMO in which GMO organisms are suddenly killing babies because there's corn making fish proteins. The criticisms literally don't make sense from a biochemical mechanism standpoint, and the previous commenters are pointing this out.
That means that the previous commenters are standing up for scientific integrity while you come along saying "big company bad, therefore everything big company says is lie"
Still, not the point. The topic of the article is corporate propaganda and you hand wave criticism away by making fun of "big company bad" remarks. To feel better than some of the most stupid criticism? That doesn't elevate you that much higher.
Yes, big company is bad. It did influence reporting and research for its own interest. That is very, very bad. Much worse than a criticism not hitting the mark by miles.
"The best way to damage a cause is to advocate for it badly."
If you allow bad anti-GMO/Monsanto arguments to proliferate, the good ones will have a harder time reaching the light.
It's not some lizard man conspiracy that bot nets and sock puppet accounts exist. In fact they are a pretty standard MO on the internet.
One doesn't have to be a shill though - they can genuinely believe and spread what they read from shills and their "expert" "independent" arguments.
Wouldn't innocently reading and accepting as genuine science Monsanto's astroturfing and Monsanto-ghost-written "scientific" papers, "independent" experts defense, etc. play quite a role in making many people pro-GMO "in principle"?
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.
"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."
[Here](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).
I can't decide if it's better explained by the power of corporate(/political) PR or simply that people don't actually care
https://nationalpost.com/news/tensions-high-between-vaccinat...
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-poll-shows-...
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/01/12/canada-poll-unvaccina...
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-...
Now you can come claiming well that's bullshit. But that can again be said for most of the companies.
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?
Very rarely it backfires & we get things like this.
Overwhelmingly, most people think this is fine.
I hate it here.
I'd expect most Facebook employees working on the main project feel like they are doing good in the world helping people connect with their friends and families, organizing events, etc...
For Google I'd expect most employees feel like their products (search, android, chrome, chrome os, maps, gmail, etc...) help billions of people in positive ways.
Case in point, BT GMOs have only trained the insect population for resistance to it: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2011/08/researchers-identif...
https://geneticliteracyproject.org/gmo-faq/do-gmo-bt-insect-...
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/06/13/9999-pesticides-we-eat-...
RoundUp. We are talking about RoundUp being sprayed onto foods. Not glyphosate. That is a tactic to avoid talking about the tests involving RoundUp.
Yes, you and Monsanto are shifting the goalposts. RoundUp is sprayed onto foods. Studies show that RoundUp is toxic. Monsanto funded a bunch of studies on glysophate in isolation to try and show that RoundUp is not toxic. RoundUp has chemicals that make it possible for Glysophate to permeate the cells.
By the way, we did see health problems. Farmers and farmhands successfully sued Monsanto for health problems caused by RoundUp.
Compassion doesn't pay and my second home won't pay for itself.
Philanthropy should be done by entities dedicated to it and ethically responsible, not as a camouflage for private data brokering.
Technically and legally both are different, but I still see both as funnelling data to advertisers.
Yes. Compassion for your fellow humans is quite unnatural for a lot of people.
It's why Christianity was a thing - a non trivial percentage of the population will only pretend to be a human being out of fear.
Could you please quantify? I recall reading the exact opposite conclusion in behavioral and psychological science journals. It’s the reason why the military has to break people down to teach them to kill. Our natural reaction is to have compassion for each other and not to kill each other.
We are a cooperative species that works well together and survives as a group. If we weren’t naturally compassionate, the human endeavor would have died out a long time ago. It also goes a long way to explain why things like hatred, racism, and subjugation of the other require massive amounts of propaganda and disinformation to perpetuate themselves.
I also recall reading in specific cases where compassion seems to be lacking, that there are larger cultural, religious, tribal, criminal, and social pressures at work influencing the outcome of human behavior to limit compassion. Once these forces are controlled for (often with the help of changes to the legal system) compassion tends to return to normal, average levels. Examples might include Good Samaritan laws.
It is my experience that more people want to help than hurt, more people want to promote the general welfare of the group rather than a select few, and more people desire to see others happy and prosperous, rather than unhappy and suffering.
This enduring, popular myth that everyone is out for themselves and doesn’t care about anyone else is the product of larger, psychopathic forces at work wishing to control society for its own purposes. The masses of humanity wish to live peacefully and in harmony with others. It is a very tiny few that have chosen to take power and use it against others. They are the ones that lack compassion, not the whole of humanity.
Over many decades, I’ve personally made note of and observed a strange and unusual undercurrent to popular culture that seeks to make people more aggressive, violent, and unnecessarily competitive and war-like, while attempting to denigrate, decrease, and diminish our proclivity for sharing and cooperation. This behavioral system of control is obvious and omnipresent once you start looking for it. It is not natural and it only serves to increase inequality and give power to fewer and fewer people.
The dunbar number limits that cooperative inclination.
> It also goes a long way to explain why things like hatred, racism, and subjugation of the other require massive amounts of propaganda and disinformation to perpetuate themselves.
This exists without the propaganda and misinformation. Tribes are an evolved social form.
If you are compassionate, surely your time is better spent trying to solve that problem, rather than posting on HackerNews?
(Not to change the subject, but this always strikes me as funny when people debate misinformation; some of the most damaging misinformation of the past 50 years was disseminated first and most intensely through the internal channels of powerful institutions.)
If you work at a company because it has a great engineering culture, but the work it happens to make it super efficient to turn babies into cowfeed, you’re still evil…for not thinking about the meaning of what you do.
If you work at a company because it has an awesome engineering culture, and the work is to make it really easy and efficient for other companies to do whatever they do, how do you assess (and take responsibility) for your work? Can you? If you can’t, what are you doing?
If you work in the cloud, this is you.
I was pretty clear in locating the root of evil in thoughtlessness.
1) Doesn't wish to discuss the ethics at all.
2) The working conditions are very good.
What you're assuming was meant wasn't actually said either. Make your case. Make well. Make it clearly and forcefully but please don't go in for those kind of hollywood-drama-style courtroom argument tricks, it's not helpful to any given discussion.
Not every position is responsible for the worst aspects of every decision made at a company/institution. No company is perfectly ethical, as people aren't perfectly ethical. Most of the work at Monsanto is for the greater good, and the world is a better place for it being around.
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.
You might be right but not what I typically have observed. Usually if things are fuzzy higher courts kick it back to lower courts to work on it more. Deferring to the legislature is what I see when what the public seems to want is at odds with what the court can do based on the law as it's written, which is a different dynamic completely.
Due to courts being very poorly equipped to deal with science, and due to rules of evidence making it very difficult to introduce science into the courtroom, court decisions are very often wrong on the science, and sometimes ignore relevant science entirely. Science in the courtroom is a pretty important and difficult problem to solve.
Edit/addendum: counter-intuitively, there are also good reasons why courts will deliberately avoid getting into the weeds with science. Basically it all comes down to the fact that the court system recognizes that it is poorly equipped to deal with scientific evidence. Barriers exist to make the courts more time-efficient and also in an effort to make it harder for the court to be misled by legal advocates on either side. It’s very easy to find someone with a PhD to support either side, or to find seemingly contradictory papers to support either side, and it basically takes an expert in science to recognize a real subject matter expert… Anyway, it’s a mess of a problem.
Since adjudicate just means to decide something judicially, that is tautological but technically correct. Beyond that narrow definition though, a jury trial is not the mechanism to decide a scientific and probabalistic question like whether spraying weed killer caused a particular case of lymphoma.
> This work was supported by Monsanto Company, the original producer and marketer of glyphosate formulations.
I went to https://www.cochranelibrary.com/search (redirected from their cochrane.org site) to search for this review and it wasn't there when I searched for "glyphosate". This is starting to look a lot like they're purposefully trying to mislead people into thinking this is an official Cochrane review, I am surprised Cochrane allows this.
I think people are suggesting not perfection, but a higher standard and thus increased likelihood of it being correct and requiring a higher standard for proving it incorrect or biased.
Do you have an organization that, if they publish something even if it runs counter to your own opinions, you assume that it is fair and likely to be correct?
sure, but as you said earlier you have no knowledge of this organization prior to this post. There seems to be two types of people in this post, those who know exactly who Cochrane is and who think knee-jerk accusations of bias are ridiculous and those who don't know who Cochrane is.
I'm betting the people who don't know who Cochrane is are not people who need to have lots of access to high quality health research, in other words not experts in any field where one should be expected to know who Cochrane was.
If a lawyer came out and told you that the latest ACM study on efficiency of parallel computation was part of a conspiracy by Apple how much weight would you place on their opinion?
Cochrane is generally well-trusted. It's not perfect and it has been manipulated. They are better than nothing, though.
Anonymously
> Mike DeVito, acting chief of the National Toxicology Program Laboratory: “We see the formulations are much more toxic. The formulations were killing the cells. The glyphosate really didn’t do it".
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/08/weedkiller-t...
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ntp/about_ntp/bsc/2017/december/pr...
As far as Monsanto and GMO, modifying certain crops to make them resistant to weedkiller just so you can dump more weedkiller on the field... might be good for weedkiller sales, but I don't think 'feeding the world' is the goal here, more like 'maximizing product sales'. Dumping all that weedkiller into lakes and rivers also destroys the base of ecosystems, which is unwise.
It's hard work imagining what mental gymnastics people do to rationalize a career spreading lies. Not so much the people who desperately take the job of repeating them, but the people who strategize around what they can get the public to believe.
https://www.cochrane.org/search/site/glyphosate
your link just used the method ( ~ aggregation of Ghostwriting researches)
EDIT: check the https://www.cochrane.org/search/site/vaccine
"Cochrane is an international network with headquarters in the UK, a registered not-for-profit organization, and a member of the UK National Council for Voluntary Organizations."
Search
1. https://www.cochranelibrary.com/search
2. type "glyphosate"
3. see the results.
Cochrane Reviews : 0 <------ ZERO
Cochrane Protocols : 0
Trials : 14
Editorials : 0
Special Collections :0
Clinical Answers : 0
1.) "Measurement of Agricultural and Dietary Glyphosate Exposure Among Pregnant Women" January 2022
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00139...
"Human exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides (GBH) is increasing rapidly worldwide. Most existing studies on health effects of glyphosate have focused on occupational settings and cancer outcomes and few have examined this common exposure in relation to the health of pregnant women and newborns in the general population. We investigated associations between prenatal glyphosate exposure and length of gestation in The Infant Development and the Environment Study (TIDES), a multi-center US pregnancy cohort...........Our results indicate widespread exposure to glyphosate in the general population which may impact reproductive health by shortening length of gestation. Given the increasing exposure to GBHs and the public health burden of preterm delivery, larger confirmatory studies are needed, especially in vulnerable populations such as pregnant women and newborns."
"Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper."
it is a Monsanto gospel
"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."
This is a Monsanto sponsored papers.
"Funding: This work was supported by Monsanto Company, the original producer and marketer of glyphosate formulations."
"Disclosure statement The sponsors were provided the opportunity to review the manuscript prior to journal submission, but inclusion of their suggestions was left to the discretion of the authors, who retained sole control of the manuscript content and the findings. Statements in this paper are those of the authors and not those of the authors' employer or the sponsors. The authors are employed by Exponent, a scientific research and consulting firm that provides services for private and governmental clients, including on projects concerning glyphosate and other pesticides. In the past five years, Ellen Chang has provided consulting services through Exponent on behalf of Monsanto Company on other issues, and she also has provided consulting services on other pesticides and lymphohematopoietic cancers for other clients."