US government paid PR firm to track and vilify critics of GMOs and pesticides

US government paid PR firm to track and vilify critics of GMOs and pesticides

Covert PR operations involving the secret profiling of over 3,000 people and organisations considered “critics” of the pesticide industry recently made headlines around the world. The secret profiles, including ones on GMWatch and its co-directors, are said to include private and personal, even intimate, information that lawyers say violate privacy laws in several countries and regions, such as the UK, the European Union, Kenya and India. They also include false, misleading and malicious claims (examples below), clearly designed to damage the reputations of those targeted.
This was all uncovered during a year-long in-depth investigation led by Lighthouse Reports, a Netherlands-based consortium of journalists that work on collaborative public interest investigations with the world’s leading media. The main breakthrough came when the investigators managed to penetrate the private social network, known as Bonus Eventus, where the profiles were being shared. This enabled them to not only access these secret dossiers, but to identify the Bonus Eventus network’s members and work out exactly who had done the profiling.
In response to the news, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), an organisation which defends independent journalism and fights against propaganda and disinformation, has called for all those involved in the profiling to be brought to justice.
US government financed Poison PR
The most explosive discovery to emerge from the Poison PR investigation was that this toxic covert operation, involving secretly monitoring and vilifying critics of GMOs and pesticides at a scale and to a level of detail considered reminiscent of the Stasi, had been funded with hundreds of thousands of US taxpayer dollars.
The Guardian columnist George Monbiot called the US government’s funding of “attacks, denial and outright lies to protect the pesticides industry from its critics” a “deeply shocking and appalling story”. The president of the Environmental Working Group, Ken Cook was also taken aback by his government’s involvement: “I thought I knew how the world worked with regard to pesticide company and pesticide lobby advocacy but this is a completely new dimension. This is sort of ‘the deep state does pesticides’.” And the European Parliament has been urged to call for an immediate investigation into what lawyers are saying are clear breaches of European privacy laws, as well as evidence of foreign interference in critical EU policy making.
Usual suspects
What came as no surprise to us at GMWatch was the identity of the little-known American “reputation management” firm that has been running this government-funded project: v-Fluence. We were equally unsurprised to learn that the still ongoing project was the brainchild of v-Fluence’s founder and CEO – former Monsanto corporate communications director Jay Byrne. That’s because for well over two decades we have been tracking Byrne and the firm that he founded on leaving Monsanto. And pretty much everything about these latest revelations tallies with Byrne’s long record of covert campaigns of character assassination.
The lowdown on Poison PR
For legal and ethical reasons, it has not been possible for Lighthouse Reports and its media partners to simply release all the material that they have uncovered during the course of their investigation into v-Fluence and the Bonus Eventus project. So what follows is mostly an overview of the details to be gleaned from the reports in Le Monde (in a 3-part series), The Guardian, The New Humanitarian, ABC News, The New Lede, and The Wire. Additionally, some related documents, which are in the public domain due to freedom of information requests, have been posted online by The New Lede in their Poison PR media library. (There are links to all of these and more throughout this article as well as in the Resources section at the end.)
So what is Bonus Eventus?
Bonus Eventus is “a private social networking portal” set up to suppress criticism and opposition to GMOs and pesticides around the world, while denigrating agroecology and other alternatives to industrial agriculture. And this secure online space for influential GMO and pesticide supporters, including government officials from multiple countries and even regulators, is where the secret profiles are shared.
But a standard internet search won’t help you find the gateway to its operations. That’s because search engines have been blocked from accessing its website. And even if someone types bonuseventus.org into their browser, they will only find a website that appears to have a few pages, none of which link or make reference to the portal.
The website’s home page currently proclaims that Bonus Eventus “is grounded in scientific integrity” and that “At Bonus Eventus, we believe in the principles of transparency and accountability”. But the Wayback Machine has repeatedly archived this page since 2013 and for its first couple of years it only showed a giant tulip. Then, for several more, it bore just the single sentence: “Bonus Eventus is a community platform supporting independent initiatives in support of favorable outcomes in food and agriculture”.
The archived pages show that, despite the more recent talk of “transparency”, at no point has there been a link from these publicly accessible pages to where invitation-only members can log in for the real action.
Inside Bonus Eventus
This is the missing link to the portal where members gain password-protected access to what Le Monde calls “a vast list of pro-agrochemical propaganda designed to influence public debate”. This includes not just the 3,000-plus secret dossiers on “critics”, but an extensive list of fact sheets providing talking points for defending GMOs and pesticides in blogs, articles, and on social media, as well as the opportunity to have private group discussions that – if you are a government official or some other public employee – can’t be unearthed by freedom of information requests.
According to ABC News, an Australian academic who is a member of Bonus Eventus told ABC that some academics in the US were using the site precisely for this reason – to avoid their email exchanges being subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) applications.
There is also apparently a regularly updated indexing of online content concerning GMOs and pesticides, with some of the items tagged “favorable” and “credit BE [Bonus Eventus],” suggesting, says Le Monde, that v-Fluence takes credit for these items’ production or publication. These are “commentaries, blog posts, opinion pieces or press interviews produced or co-produced by people registered on Bonus Eventus. The content highlights the pesticide industry’s favourite angles of attack: Much of it specifically targets the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the bête noire of the agrochemical giants.”
Network members also receive Byrne’s regular Bonus Eventus newsletters. ...
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Read the full article and access linked sources:
https://gmwatch.org/en/106-news/latest-news/20475

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