Feb 1, 2022 07:30 PM
Cost Of Ignoring Science: Non-GMO Labels Lead to Lawsuits
https://www.acsh.org/news/2022/01/31/cos...uits-16091
INTRO: Baby food giant Gerber faces a class-action lawsuit alleging that it falsely marketed some of its products as "non-GMO." The litigation is frivolous, but Gerber could have done itself a favor had it avoided labeling schemes in the first place.
A few things can be said with certainty about “non-GMO” food labels. There's no scientific justification for their existence, since products made from genetically engineered (GE) ingredients do not pose a risk to consumers. Such labeling schemes are therefore nothing more than marketing gimmicks, and they can backfire on the companies that employ them.
Case in point: a class-action lawsuit recently filed against baby food maker Gerber alleged that the company is “cheating” its customers by selling non-GMO products that, in fact, contain GE ingredients or are derived from GE crops or animals that eat them. The law firm Keller Heckmen summed up the case in a recent blog post... (MORE - missing details)
Facebook versus the BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o95
INTRO: The BMJ has locked horns with Facebook and the gatekeepers of international fact checking after one of its investigations was wrongly labelled with “missing context” and censored on the world’s largest social network. Rebecca Coombes and Madlen Davies report
On 3 November Howard Kaplan, a retired dentist from Israel, posted a link to a BMJ investigation article in a private Facebook group.1 The investigation reported poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia, a contract research company helping to carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial.
The article brought in record traffic to bmj.com and was widely shared on Twitter, helping it achieve the second highest “Altmetric” score of all time across all biomedical publications. But a week after his posting Kaplan woke up to a message from Facebook (fig 1).
“The Facebook Thought Police has issued me a dire warning,” he wrote in a new post. “Facebook’s ‘independent fact-checker’ doesn’t like the wording of the article by the BMJ. And if I don’t delete my post, they are threatening to make my posts less visible. Obviously, I will not delete my post . . . If it seems like I’ve disappeared for a while, you’ll know why.”
Kaplan was not the only Facebook user having problems. Soon, several BMJ readers were alerting the journal to Facebook’s censorship. Over the past two months the journal’s editorial staff have been navigating the opaque appeals process without success, and still today their investigation remains obscured on Facebook.
The experience has highlighted serious concerns about the “fact checking” being undertaken by third party providers on behalf of Facebook, specifically the lack of accountability and oversight of their actions, and the resulting censorship of information... (MORE - details)
https://www.acsh.org/news/2022/01/31/cos...uits-16091
INTRO: Baby food giant Gerber faces a class-action lawsuit alleging that it falsely marketed some of its products as "non-GMO." The litigation is frivolous, but Gerber could have done itself a favor had it avoided labeling schemes in the first place.
A few things can be said with certainty about “non-GMO” food labels. There's no scientific justification for their existence, since products made from genetically engineered (GE) ingredients do not pose a risk to consumers. Such labeling schemes are therefore nothing more than marketing gimmicks, and they can backfire on the companies that employ them.
Case in point: a class-action lawsuit recently filed against baby food maker Gerber alleged that the company is “cheating” its customers by selling non-GMO products that, in fact, contain GE ingredients or are derived from GE crops or animals that eat them. The law firm Keller Heckmen summed up the case in a recent blog post... (MORE - missing details)
Facebook versus the BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong
https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o95
INTRO: The BMJ has locked horns with Facebook and the gatekeepers of international fact checking after one of its investigations was wrongly labelled with “missing context” and censored on the world’s largest social network. Rebecca Coombes and Madlen Davies report
On 3 November Howard Kaplan, a retired dentist from Israel, posted a link to a BMJ investigation article in a private Facebook group.1 The investigation reported poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia, a contract research company helping to carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial.
The article brought in record traffic to bmj.com and was widely shared on Twitter, helping it achieve the second highest “Altmetric” score of all time across all biomedical publications. But a week after his posting Kaplan woke up to a message from Facebook (fig 1).
“The Facebook Thought Police has issued me a dire warning,” he wrote in a new post. “Facebook’s ‘independent fact-checker’ doesn’t like the wording of the article by the BMJ. And if I don’t delete my post, they are threatening to make my posts less visible. Obviously, I will not delete my post . . . If it seems like I’ve disappeared for a while, you’ll know why.”
Kaplan was not the only Facebook user having problems. Soon, several BMJ readers were alerting the journal to Facebook’s censorship. Over the past two months the journal’s editorial staff have been navigating the opaque appeals process without success, and still today their investigation remains obscured on Facebook.
The experience has highlighted serious concerns about the “fact checking” being undertaken by third party providers on behalf of Facebook, specifically the lack of accountability and oversight of their actions, and the resulting censorship of information... (MORE - details)