Thread by @exceedhergrasp1

Let's talk about the UK's Science Media Centre and its history.

The Centre calls itself "an independent press office for science, working closely with press officers from universities, scientific companies, research funders &leading science and engineering institutions."

The SMC is a publicly-funded PR group, representing influential corporations whose financial interests are threatened by the interests of the public.

Connie St. Louis, then president of the Association of British Science Writers, said:

St. Louis performed a study on SMC. Over half the SMC’s "expert reactions" were covered in the press and "in 23% of the stories... the only quotes were those that came from the centre."

“Whatever the SMC delivered to them is what they used,” she said. tinyurl.com/2hhf562n

SMC championed Monsanto's use of heavy-duty pesticides on their more pesticide-resistant GMOs. The contention was that their products contained too much pesticide to be safe.

If you remember framing of anti-GMO arguments very differently... there's a reason for that.

David Miller, co-founder of Public Interest Investigations, said SMC promotes a "certain kind of science... that corporations and governments... want to see developed... Once it steps... to supporting science policy, SMC becomes political, even though it pretends not to be."

Miller has also pointed out that, while SMC presents itself as an institution of science, many of its experts do not have higher-level degrees or work in the field of their SMC-declared expertise.

The remainder were corporate lobbyists and CEOs.

The Science Media Centre also championed the safety of fracking. “The role of the SMC appears to be putting a relatively narrow view of, in most cases positive, opinions of the safety of fracking," reported Paul Mobbs, who founded an environmental group.

All of these projects have three things in common:
(1) A corporate interest has something to lose
(2) The public stands to be harmed
(3) The science described is considered cutting-edge and/or challenging to understand, and therefore 'up for debate' (and ripe for disinformation).

Perhaps it should not be surprising that one of SMC's favorite targets over the past decade is disabled folk. Government has an inarguable financial interest in claiming as few disabled people as humanly possible; they have a real stake in who "gets to be" disabled.

ME/CFS has been a favored target of SMC for over a decade; #LongCOVID is next. So when you see UK outlets uncritically repeating oddly identical unscientific, harmful talking points about disabled people, understand where this is coming from & do not help spread disinfo.

As a journalist, if you see a belief no evidence could feasibly counter yet it's presented as a scientific finding? Please think twice before promoting it uncritically... or at all. I'll let St. Louis close us out:

@PutAimovigOnNHS I think pushback would actually be really interesting, and pull in more readers & possibly more revenue, but I don't run these folks' businesses.

I do know many readers have a real hunger for nuance and detail, or no one would be running Last Week Tonight.

@PutAimovigOnNHS Nuance and reality are still powerful because there is a huge contingent of humans who value them. I think many journalists are ethical and want to use their voices well.

We can't deny that market forces encourage writing bad things quickly-- they're just not the only forces.

@PhoenixMe_ (Also: thank you.)

@MECFSNanoneedle Individuals can make ethical decisions.

Profit-driven systems? Not so much.

@MECFSNanoneedle When we say $54B loss to "the economy" corporate interests don't care about that. That's in part about how much individuals make/lose. Capitalists aren't interested in how much money "the country" is losing, provided they are able to keep moving money around/do better than others

@MECFSNanoneedle For example, so many were out of work during COVID but corporations saw RECORD profits. That's what they care about, & government is a bunch of corporations in a trenchcoat, that's what THEY care about. They only care about individuals insofar as they affect their bottom line.

@MECFSNanoneedle "Seventeen of the top 25 most profitable corporations are expected to rake in $85 billion more in profits during 2020 than what they averaged in the four years before the pandemic."

ncjustice.org/wp-content/upl…

@MECFSNanoneedle So you see Long COVID and ME/CFS as this huge financial opportunity-- pharma sees it as an untenable risk. And government doesn't care, much, about the loss of us overall, in part b/c caring about COVID means spending could drop again and foment unrest as it did in 2020.

@MECFSNanoneedle So let's say they read that Brookings report that said that 15% of job vacancies were due to Long COVID. Because of the political issues around COVID, they'll pretend it's due to something else. If "nobody wants to work anymore" stops working, they'll pivot.

@MECFSNanoneedle Anyway, I'll stop here; I'm sure this is more than you bargained on receiving as an answer!

...a lotta quote-tweets from locked accounts, unsurprisingly 😮‍💨

Propaganda uses the same catch-phrases b/c the more folks read the same words & phrases the more likely they are to internalize their message. 🙄

Five outlets using the exact same quotes (and article titles!) from a press release should give readers pause, but it probably won't.

SMC's PR strategy is to discredit disabled people and disability in general.

But it is not up to you to 'prove' your disability, much less to internet strangers.

Instead, let's explore the unreliability of the source and how uncritically it was parroted by the UK press.

Muting this one now.