US-Funded 'Social Network' Attacking Pesticide Critics Shuts Down (theguardian.com) 64
The US company v-Fluence secretly compiled profiles on over 500 food and environmental health advocates, scientists, and politicians in a private web portal to discredit critics of pesticides and GM crops. Following public backlash and corporate cancellations after its actions were revealed by the Guardian, the company announced it was shutting down the profiling service. The Guardian reports: The profiles -- part of an effort that was financed, in part, by US taxpayer dollars -- often provided derogatory information about the industry opponents and included home addresses and phone numbers and details about family members, including children. They were provided to members of an invite-only web portal where v-Fluence also offered a range of other information to its roster of more than 1,000 members. The membership included staffers of US regulatory and policy agencies, executives from the world's largest agrochemical companies and their lobbyists, academics and others.
The profiling was one element of a push to downplay pesticide dangers, discredit opponents and undermine international policymaking, according to court records, emails and other documents obtained by the non-profit newsroom Lighthouse Reports. Lighthouse collaborated with the Guardian, the New Lede, Le Monde, Africa Uncensored, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and other international media partners on the September 2024 publication of the investigation. News of the profiling and the private web portal sparked outrage and threats of litigation by some of the people and organizations profiled. [...]
v-Fluence says it not only has eliminated the profiling, but also has made "significant staff cuts" after the public exposure, according to Jay Byrne, the former Monsanto public relations executive who founded and heads the company. Byrne blamed the company's struggles on "rising costs from continued litigator and activist harassment of our staff, partners, and clients with threats and misrepresentations." He said the articles published about the company's profiling and private web portal were part of a "smear campaign" which was based on "false and misleading misrepresentations" that were "not supported by any facts or evidence." Adding to the company's troubles, several corporate backers and industry organizations have cancelled contracts with v-Fluence, according a post in a publication for agriculture professionals.
The profiling was one element of a push to downplay pesticide dangers, discredit opponents and undermine international policymaking, according to court records, emails and other documents obtained by the non-profit newsroom Lighthouse Reports. Lighthouse collaborated with the Guardian, the New Lede, Le Monde, Africa Uncensored, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and other international media partners on the September 2024 publication of the investigation. News of the profiling and the private web portal sparked outrage and threats of litigation by some of the people and organizations profiled. [...]
v-Fluence says it not only has eliminated the profiling, but also has made "significant staff cuts" after the public exposure, according to Jay Byrne, the former Monsanto public relations executive who founded and heads the company. Byrne blamed the company's struggles on "rising costs from continued litigator and activist harassment of our staff, partners, and clients with threats and misrepresentations." He said the articles published about the company's profiling and private web portal were part of a "smear campaign" which was based on "false and misleading misrepresentations" that were "not supported by any facts or evidence." Adding to the company's troubles, several corporate backers and industry organizations have cancelled contracts with v-Fluence, according a post in a publication for agriculture professionals.
Re: Follow the science (Score:1)
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"v-Fluence, which also had the former agrochemical firm Monsanto as a client, secured some funding from the US government as part of a contract with a third party. Public spending records show the US Agency for International Development (USAid) contracted with a separate non-governmental organization that manages a government initiative to promote GM crops in African and Asian countries."
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So USAID gave money to NGO to promote GM crops, and NGO hired v-fluence?
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MAGA type slams Antivaxxer type because they misunderstood each other's propaganda.
Grabs popcorn.
What's good for the goose... (Score:5, Funny)
[Byrne] said the articles published about the company's profiling and private web portal were part of a "smear campaign" which was based on "false and misleading misrepresentations"
So... kinda like the stuff you were doing to the critics of pesticides and GM crops?
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It's a nice stock phrase. Other's should use it too:
[hypothetical bad person says reports of their crimes are]... a "smear campaign" which was based on "false and misleading misrepresentations
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But once the victims realize that they can ask their AI what "turnabout is fair play" means, then the games may begin.
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It's a roundabout way of saying you're going "old testament". (i.e., i4ani)
Re:Organics, bro (Score:5, Interesting)
Because the toxins kill you much, much, much slower than starving to death. Those toxins guarantee that Panama Disease doesn't destroy a country's entire crop of bananas, that Phylloxera Louse doesn't destroy all the grape vines. (Nowadays, farmers also use different breeds of a plant to minimize such plague and pestilence.) So you have food, even mediocre food that allows to you live healthy for a long time. Notice that health research is currently fixated on microplastics 'poisoning' the body, not insecticides.
Starvation was predicted by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1970) but it didn't happen because of new insecticides. "Future Shock" is a generic term for a country that fails to benefit from new technology. We're seeing that with social networks and always-connected people, notably children, at the moment. The damage to education, politics and cultural identity, is overwhelming many countries.
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It only works temporarily of course. If crops can be resistant to something, then so can pests. Just a question of evolution and monocultures speed up evolution. The failure of antibiotics is just the start.
Health research is interested in highly persistent chemicals too. Most new pesticides are organofluorine, persistence is so very nice for a pesticide. Unfortunately we can't evolve as fast as microbes, so accumulation is more of a problem for us.
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Notice that health research is currently fixated on microplastics 'poisoning' the body, not insecticides.
Welcome to capitalism, where research into what's killing us is directed by popular opinion.
Starvation was predicted by Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (1970) but it didn't happen because of new insecticides.
That was only way to make it not happen. We're making stronger, pesticide-resistant bugs, and we're killing off the bugs that predate on the harmful bugs. It's a delaying tactic, nothing more. We don't have a next plan for how to deal with insects.
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How on earth did human beings survive without starving for the thousands of years between the start of farming and today?
Re: Organics, bro (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Organics, bro (Score:5, Interesting)
By not destroying working ecosystems, like we've been doing since inventing agriculture. Nature had a kind of stasis in which the things which eat the plants and the things which eat the things which eat the plants were both developing. Now we've reduced the numbers of both of those things overall, but sometimes we lose control and it's the things which eat the plants which flourish because we've planted massive monocultures of their food while suppressing their predators. So we wind up creating plagues of locusts or what have you (sometimes it is literally locusts) by killing off their enemies and preparing massive food supplies for them.
Integrated Pest Management (usually just called IPM) involves having trap crops, and the plants which the pest predators depend on, interspersed with fields. Besides that we've also cut down the trees which slow down the wind, because deer can hide in them and then come out and shit on the fields. The trees not only house birds which eat pests, but also a) stop so much dirt blowing away when fields are plowed and b) catch the dirt before it flies into a waterway.
In short, they survived by not doing the things we are now doing.
Re: Organics, bro (Score:3)
By living a full and happy life well into their thirties.
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How on earth did human beings survive without starving for the thousands of years between the start of farming and today?
Hunter gatherer life. Brutal short lives, and population limited by just getting by with what you could hunt and gather. It is what honed our biological metabolism.
You were born, started reproducing as soon as you hit puberty, and didn't live much past 30. Although there were elderly people- by present day definition - there were a lot less - they were definitely anomalies.
And we almost disappeared as a species at least once. https://www.livescience.com/ar... [livescience.com] about a hundred thousand years ago, humani
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AFAIK, the numbers are skewed due to infant mortality.
If you survived to be about 8, odds were that you'd live to be pretty old. However, a giant number of kids died. This was quite common until relatively recent times. It was not that long ago when a woman had the proverbial dozen kids but seven of them died in childhood.
That's my understanding of the current science. I'm definitely not an expert in the field, so don't go quoting me in any journals or anything.
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AFAIK, the numbers are skewed due to infant mortality.
If you survived to be about 8, odds were that you'd live to be pretty old. However, a giant number of kids died. This was quite common until relatively recent times. It was not that long ago when a woman had the proverbial dozen kids but seven of them died in childhood.
That's my understanding of the current science. I'm definitely not an expert in the field, so don't go quoting me in any journals or anything.
I've read some of that, where claims that hunter Gatheres lived to about 70. I'm a little skeptical that the claim that it was infant mortality, but once you got past it, it was clear sailing to present day lifespan. I mean, is the idea that people lasted that long without medical care? I've been in several accidents as a modern person without modern medical care, I would have been dead at 23. Just seems like the people then who had the same sort of accidents.
Then again, we don't have any around to as
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I hope I didnt insinuate that it was 'clear sailing', as I hoped only to assert that it was statistically more likely that you'd reach old age.
After all, you could die from a simple cut or even a tooth infection. Your accident may well have killed you at that age. Still, plenty of people lived to be fairly old. We have skeletons that we can date fairly accurately. As they're organic matter, we can even figure out when they lived in history.
Life was still very much hard and short. It's just that those people
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I hope I didnt insinuate that it was 'clear sailing', as I hoped only to assert that it was statistically more likely that you'd reach old age.
No no, just a conversation.
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Ah, good good...
I'm certainly not an expert in the field. I've just read a ton and it has been a passing interest. I once dated an archaeologist and have even volunteered to go on a few digs. My dig qualifications are 'moving dirt' and not 'important dirt'. I think archaeology grad students are the hardest-worked grad students out there. They have to go on digs where they mostly shovel dirt out of the way. That work is often unpaid.
I was not qualified to shovel the important dirt. Instead, I shoveled dirt o
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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They didn't have monoculture farms? Also the population was vastly smaller than today, and you didn't need artificial fertilizers to feed the world. Also, people starved a lot.
Just like with stocks and bonds, a good solution to modern farming is to diversify. As it is, you can fly over entire states that appear to be nothing but corn or soybeans.
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Because the toxins kill you much, much, much slower than starving to death. Those toxins guarantee that Panama Disease doesn't destroy a country's entire crop of bananas, that Phylloxera Louse doesn't destroy all the grape vines. (Nowadays, farmers also use different breeds of a plant to minimize such plague and pestilence.) So you have food, even mediocre food that allows to you live healthy for a long time. Notice that health research is currently fixated on microplastics 'poisoning' the body, not insecticides.
Interesting point. Do you think the sudden panic over plastics might be a diversionary tactic? We've certainly had plastics for a long time, and I haven't heard what problems they cause.
Certainly nothing like the research that shows that autism rates increasing with proximity to locations with glyphosate use. While the asshat anti-vaxxers of the liberal variety blamed thimerosal for autism, then after it was removed, the rates didn't change. Here's some of the proximity info https://loe.org/shows/segments [loe.org]
Re: Organics, bro (Score:2)
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Clearly you never garden. Organics yes fun on small scale with losses to pests. To feed mass amounts of people you need massive yield.
Clearly you never garden. Planting in guilds and using zero tilth agriculture and IPM produces higher per-acre yields, not lower, and with reduced energy input. The reason we don't do it commercially is that it is incompatible with machine cultivation, not that it doesn't work better. It's for purely economic reasons, the labor costs would be higher if we gardened instead of farming.
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You could, but it would take a lot more labor until robotics catches up to being able to pick produce cost-effectively.
On the other hand, it would take immensely less land and quite a bit less water, so if those were priced fairly, it would be more attractive.
Punish the customers (Score:3)
No-one's talking about the people buying this harassing and defaming of people doing their job: The US government should punish the customers of v-Fluence. Otherwise, it's enabling 'wash, rinse, repeat'.
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" The US government should punish the customers of v-Fluence. "
Have you not been paying attention? The current alleged administration is populated with likely customers of v-Fluence.
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I was talking about the general habit of US politicians to not punish corporations while this crime is so egregious that politicians can't excuse their owner's bad behaviour. In that respect, the current administration isn't worse or better, it's just eliminating the middle-men (the politicians). As long as politicians protect corporations, the inevitable result will be an administration exactly like the current one.
Re:Punish the customers (Score:5, Insightful)
The current administration is finding and ripping out exactly the same sorts of operations all throughout the government.
No, that's not what they are doing at all. If that's all they were doing, that would be great. What they are doing is shutting down whole agencies and then using the bad parts as an excuse, what they SHOULD be doing is excising the bad parts. But the plan was never "rip out these bad parts we have identified", it has always been "shut down as much of the government as possible to reduce the tax burden on and accountability for the wealthy". They pay 70% of the taxes while they take home 90% of the profit, then they cry that they're overtaxed when in fact the opposite is true. If they want to pay less in taxes, they can let us have more of the money. It's a good idea if they don't want to get fucking eaten when we have nothing else to eat. And I mean that literally. They think their mercenaries won't turn on them when the food runs out? They think hired killers won't chow down? Further proof that the owning class is made up of fucking morons.
The plan has always been to shut down the parts they don't like, and replace even the parts they do like with corporations which they control and profit from directly. They have been telling us as much OUT LOUD the whole time, how some people can have failed to hear them is well beyond me.
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Oh stuff it. 2017-2020 they tried reforming stuff (maybe not in ways you would agree with but) they tried incremental change following most norms of practice.
You know perfectly well what happened. The #resistance. Not only was every little thing the president tried to do challenged in court, as it is being again, but we found out what most conservatives already guessed was true, the civil service was not apolitical at all. They organized a coordinated effort at insubordination, that if you want to talk a
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There is answer to this, these federal agencies need to be moved OUT of Washington DC, the employees need to being given a hard return to office mandate. Put them in small offices ALL over the country
Yes! What we need is less efficiency!
Wait, aren't you guys constantly whining about cutting costs, without ever being willing to start with the DOD, which ALWAYS fails its audits?
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Re: Punish the customers (Score:2)
No the administration is withdrawing hundreds of millions in food and medicine aid and hiding behind stories like this where a few US government employees were found to have accounts in this system they probably paid a few hundred dollars a year to join. Trade associations are funded by corporations and invite government and NGO members pay nominal fees to be "associate members."
That's like saying Walmart is funded by the US government because the folks at the post office buy office birthday cakes there.
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Re: Punish the customers (Score:1)
The targets just don't align with the current administration's objectives, so the perpetrators' "talents" can best be used elsewhere...
Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow, this is a spectacular abuse of corporate power, which is unlikely to result in any sanctions against the abusers. And it was paid for by the US government. You couldn't make it up.
The only hope for effective punishment probably lies in the EU's GDPR rules; I would imagine that the system didn't exclude all EU residents.
Re:Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Europe is about to get a lesson in the true nature of their relationship with the US; finding out very clearly who the real master is. (Hint: it's the one which has an extensive permanent military presence in the other.) A good thing, too, because the European people are totally in the dark about it thanks to their (non) leaders. Their wake-up call is long overdue. (No, I'm not a Trump supporter.)
LoL...
Yeah, someone is going to get a real lesson about how little power they have but it's not the EU.
It'll be the one with the orange clown currently wrecking their economy. Every time the Republicans have got power in the last 25 years it's ended up worse for the US. You've had several wake up calls but still sleepwalk problems you didn't have to have. Europe will be fine, the US is going to find itself against the world and figuring out that it's real power was getting the world to follow it willingly. Remember the last war the US won was 80 years ago which you joined late and didn't do most of the fighting. The last war you fought on your own was 100 years ago against a failing colonial power and the last time you fought a peer state on your own... you were fighting yourselves.
Re: Just when you thought it couldn't get any wors (Score:2)
If I stipulate Iâ(TM)m a n00b about history can you tell me which us war was a century ago, solo, and against a colonial power?
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Europe is about to get a lesson in the true nature of their relationship with the US; finding out very clearly who the real master is. (Hint: it's the one which has an extensive permanent military presence in the other.) A good thing, too, because the European people are totally in the dark about it thanks to their (non) leaders. Their wake-up call is long overdue. (No, I'm not a Trump supporter.)
You do not have to be a supporter of orange man to understand reality. A bit of history will show people exactly why the US maintains military presence there.
Putin is simply following the playbook that his mentor Old Uncle Joe started. Buffer states. The lads like having buffer states between Russia and the rest of the world. Those nations can die first. That is why NATO was formed.
Put simply, if you don't want teh evilz 'Murricans and their bases in your Euro country? Fine - enjoy your life in the Ru
Re: Just when you thought it couldn't get any wors (Score:4, Informative)
It was *not* paid for by the US government, it was paid for by agribusiness corporations. A few US government employees had accounts in the system which probably amounted to as little as a few hundred dollars a year.
I don't really understand The Guardian's report (Score:5, Interesting)
From what I can tell, USA funded a non-government organization (the IFPRI) to push modern USA tech like GMOs and pesticides to other countries. The IFPRI then gave $400,000 over 6 years -- like, the salary ($66k) of a single upper-lower-class or low-middle-class employee -- to v-Fluence.
From here, it looks like v-Fluence created an ag industry conference called Bonus Eventus, and a website to support it with all the facts and opinions they want to push. TFA is calling Bonus Eventus a "private social network".
When I first read The Guardian's report last year, it felt like they were heavily weasel wording to make me come away with an opinion of v-Fluence and USA's connection to their actions that wasn't actually supported by facts. I wasn't sure if it was rage bait or sloppy journalism. Did we ever find out what USA's actual connection here is?
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Looks like USAid which has already been mentioned, plus USDA (to the tune of $4.9M)?
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USAID? Aha! (Score:2)
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USAID was the first to go because they were looking into Starlink contracts. https://www.newsweek.com/usaid... [newsweek.com]
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And of course we can trust everything musk says
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The president has zero authority when it comes to funding. That is a congressional matter. https://history.house.gov/Inst... [house.gov]
Trump and Elmo can mouth off all they want. Probably why every one of Trump's measures has been halted by judges.
Just so Iâ(TM)m clear (Score:1)
They only "closed" down because they got caught (Score:2)