Nine years of censorship

http://www.nature.com/news/nine-years-of-censorship-1.19842

by michaelmachine • 10 years ago

302 124 10 years ago

alex20• 10 years ago

I had friends who supported the muzzling. "They are just trying to spark propaganda and brainwash our society" was what one in particular said.

I just dropped the subject from there on out :|

bcpermafrost• 10 years ago

Its crazy that people think that throwing out documented statistics and facts is brainwashing.

I hate tinfoil hat conspiracies. Its starting to plague society and get people disconnected from problems that need immediate attention.

Its good you dropped the subject, there's just no reasoning with them.

philovivero• 10 years ago

It would be good to remember that a vast majority of people don't respond to reason. They respond to emotion. If you make someone feel good about your argument, they will agree with your argument.

It seem the more likely one is to want to help society, the less likely that person understands this fundamental aspect of human nature.

And so somehow the ones who really GET IT are the ones in power, and the ones who don't want to make anything better.

It's so refreshing when you find a persuader in charge of everything who also wants to make everything better, like say Duterte in the Philippines, for example.

snowwindwaves• 10 years ago

It seems papers were still published, but government scientists were not allowed to say whatever they wanted to the media outside of what they said in their scientific papers.

I don't presume to speak for the organization I work for or the industry I work in.

bduerst2• 10 years ago

It seems the internet is rewarding more and more those who can manufacture outrage, with clicks, likes, karma, affirmation, etc.

It's no wonder then that it pervades into peoples lives, shaping their world view and even their presidential candidate selection.

striking• 10 years ago

Dropping the subject isn't always the best idea. It's only a good idea if they're unreasonable individuals. You can often have very interesting conversations with well-reasoned but poorly-informed people.

blue_dinner2• 10 years ago

well, the same thing happens when people would like to discuss alternative theories to the causes of climate change. The BBC, for instance, outright bans anyone that talks about it (and so do many other forums), which is outright censorship.

We should be fighting for the freedom to discuss any topic, not just a select few that matches up with the current narrative.

mediumdeviation2• 10 years ago

That's funny, because in 2014 the BBC was admonished by independent reviewers for giving too much airtime to climate change deniers under their 'too rigid' impartiality guidelines [1].

From the Telegraph [2]

The BBC’s determination to give a balanced view has seen it pit scientists arguing for climate change against far less qualified opponents such as Lord Lawson who heads a campaign group lobbying against the government’s climate change policies. Andrew Montford, who runs the Bishop Hill climate sceptic blog, former children’s television presenter Johnny Ball and Bob Carter, a retired Australian geologist, are among the other climate sceptics that have appeared on the BBC.

I think I agree with the BBC's own comedian's take on this, which is to give each side time proportional to the amount of support they have from experts in the field. In other words, for every ten minutes of airtime for climate experts on climate change caused by humans, we can have 18 seconds, or 3% of climate skeptics speaking.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/0...

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/10944629/B...

sudojudo• 10 years ago

Asimov summed it up nicely:

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'

sageikosa11• 10 years ago

Some might compare that to allowing atheists only a few micro-seconds to make the case for the non-existence of deities due to the overwhelming number of experts in the field of religion.

hueving• 10 years ago

To be fair, experts in a field that's whole existence is being criticized (e.g. saying modeling isn't accurate/whatever) shouldn't be given more weight in that regard.

Consider how many 'experts' there are in numerology. Should we restrict a person from speaking out against them because he/she isn't an expert?

jerryhuang1003• 10 years ago

climate change is a fact, not a theory. just like earth is round as irregularly shaped ellipsoid, not flat. if you want to have an irrational theory against a fact, at least you should work on your evidences and experiments about your crazy theory to proof it, otherwise you're just lazy and crazy.

sageikosa11• 10 years ago

I've always taken the position that the totality of climatic conditions on this planet are not a designed systemic whole, so there is no teleological purpose to it. If this were not so, then we might best be aimed at setting it back to a past condition (such as the Hadean, right after the heavy bombardment stopped and the crust solidified); since anything else is an alteration to its factory default setting.

blue_dinner2• 10 years ago

Climate change is a fact. The causes are just theories based on computer models.

To say that it's a fact and needs no further study is not only anti-intellectual, it’s criminal.

I worked in academia for over a decade. Knowing what I know about the process and how much ego, money, and politics are involved, it really makes it difricult for me to believe any study isn't biased.

Thw entire system needs to be scrapped and started over.

CWuestefeld• 10 years ago

We should be fighting for the freedom to discuss any topic, not just a select few that matches up with the current narrative.

You have the freedom to discuss any topic. This has nothing to do with freedom of speech, it's purely a policy issue. If you don't like how government policy affects research, then stop advocating for the government to be doing so much of the research.

Private-sector scientists were not muzzled; this wasn't a censorship issue at all. If you're speaking on your own dime, or that of an employer who's willing to have their name on it, then there's no problem.

But the Canadian government decided that they weren't willing to let the scientists that they employed speak in that capacity. That's purely a matter of employer-employee relationship.

I'm not saying it was the right thing to do. I'm saying that we know that government is politics. When we bring government into any enterprise, we also bring in the politics. If you dislike politics, then you should be advocating to keep the government and their politics out of other affairs as much as possible.

intrasight3• 10 years ago

Hopefully some day US scientists will be granted the same freedom to discuss their research.

adventured• 10 years ago

The US Government, directly or indirectly via funding, publishes more open scientific research than nearly the entire rest of the planet combined. That spans segments ranging from space to medical to habitat to energy.

drzaiusapelord2• 10 years ago

Uh what is Obama suppressing exactly here? If anything, the US has one of the most, if not the most open and prolific science publishing in history.

Does every HN political post need a highly upvoted 'But the US is worse' cite-less snarking?

Retric• 10 years ago

Much of this stuff is not visible. Back in the No Child left behind days some people relatively high up in the administration where harassing a researcher based on her research. I found this out from one of her graduate students not the news.

I don't recall all the details, but a large part of the push was centered around a politically connected company selling some education materials. And the research suggested that approach was not useful.

Now extend that to issues people actually care about and I suspect a lot of this stays under the radar.

intrasight3• 10 years ago

It's no Obama or any one person. It is an institutional thing. Certainly people, especially presidents, can change the institutions. That's what we're witnessing in Canada. I'm not snarking nor saying the US is worse. But it's a fact that unless your title includes "spokesperson" then you are not fully at liberty to speak.

intrasight3• 10 years ago

Here the "cite" you were looking for http://www.ucsusa.org/center-science-and-democracy/promoting...

6stringmerc• 10 years ago

Personally when I read about this kind of censorship it reminds me that these types of people - those craving power, and willing to go to great lengths to achieve it as an ends unto itself, with apparently little regard for the notion of serving the general public - also want access to every citizen's communications, whereabouts, and under the auspices of security, safety...peace...

Well, in a world where information wants to be free - good information and exposes, and even bad information like debunked anti-vaccine hoopla - those who seek to control it should be viewed suspiciously. In the case of the Harper government actions, suspicion can easily be revised to "clear agenda and manipulation to those ends" which, you know, sounds a lot worse on paper. What a horrible way to treat scientists, really, just a terribly pig-headed and shamlessly pandering approach by the Harper government to please who they felt needed pleasing.

osweiller9• 10 years ago

This was a government worker's union issue that got absurdly bent out of proportion.

The government demanded that government employees get approval for any direct communications with media, etc. This all began when a researcher seriously impacted the salmon industry by releasing extremely preliminary results (that turned out to be wrong), making a name for herself and setting up a PR circuit. The media loves apocalyptic outcomes ("So would you say this means that we're all going to die?"), so of course it made headlines with the most dire of predictions.

This was not an independent researcher. This was not the private sector. This was someone directly employed by the government. It's like a Microsoft employee wrote about vulnerabilities in Windows on their private blog, offering to sell solutions.

So the government put a process in place not unlike much of the Western world, doing nothing to control the science (papers were published, research was released, etc. The scientific world understands that preliminary results are preliminary), but having everything to do with the message relayed to the media. Of course this was met with a conspiratorial narrative that continues to this day: That they were hiding dire greenhouse gas/global warming information, for instance.

But the shackles have come off. Where are all of these dramatic scientific findings that were suppressed?

...crickets...

The single example constantly floated is about a guy who got called by a reporter about a paper he released about ~~slime mold~~ rock snot (the exampled floated in literally hundreds of articles about the muzzling of scientists). This government scientist was outraged that he couldn't get approval within 24 hours, and the reporter lost interest. Apparently rock snot is a real timely issue in media circles.

There was a lot wrong with the prior government. An enormous amount. By this particular story is about some freelancing employees who don't want anyone telling them what to do.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 10 years ago

That's an extremely heterodox spin.

I notice you don't cite a single article, but here's one: http://www.salon.com/2014/08/19/canadas_despicable_climate_c...

"In 2010, three years after Harper first introduced the new communications policy, Environment Canada reported that media coverage of climate change had dropped by more than 80 percent. Meanwhile, the Canadian government’s continued to wage war on science, often at the expense of the environment. In 2013, when NSIDC again reported that summer sea ice was melting, Leona Aglukkaq, Harper’s environment minister, downplayed the findings, explaining in a follow-up conversation that it was “debatable” whether the Arctic was warming. Without free access to the facts, one could argue, that’s a pretty difficult debate to have."

And here's a University of Victoria report: http://www.elc.uvic.ca/2013-muzzlingscientists/

"Yet research done by ELC student Clayton Greenwood demonstrates that the federal government is preventing the media and the Canadian public from speaking to government scientists for news stories especially when the scientists’ research or point of view runs counter to current Government policies on matters such as environmental protection, oil sands development, and climate change. In sharp contrast to past Canadian practice and current US government practice, the federal government has recently made concerted efforts to prevent the media and through them, the general public from speaking to government scientists, and this, in turn, impoverishes the public debate on issues of significant national concern. "

I did some googling and couldn't find a slime mold story, but surely you have a link handy?

osweiller9• 10 years ago

EDIT: It is outrageous that it is impossible to discuss the facts of this without everyone immediately veering to their partisan sides.

Sorry, it was "rock snot".

I don't cite an article because this is really about the absence of something, not the existence of something. What is there to cite? Supposedly during the period in question the scientific world was suppressed. They've now had more than 6 months to drop all of the science bombs that were pent up. Literally nothing. Nothing was suppressed.

media coverage of climate change had dropped by more than 80 percent

This is an utterly outrageous claim, as if climate science is dependent upon media access to government scientists (particularly Canadian government scientists). There is an enormous non-government group of scientists in Canada, any of whom will freely talk (within the confines and agenda of their own employer, of course). And indeed, the science was as unrestricted as it always was, so they have all of the data and findings to talk to. This is the sort of "find the agenda" noise that just perverts the discussion -- remarkably the media still barely ever talks about global warming, nor do they reference government scientists. It just turns out that the story no longer brought the clicks and the viewers.

Your other link, "research" from a student at the Environment Law Center, begins by saying - "There are few issues more fundamental to democracy than the ability of the public to access scientific information produced by government scientists". But again, absolutely nothing changed about the science that government scientists produced, or its accessibility. The single and only change that happened was media access to government employees, which generally meant "try to get a soundbite that can be presented as we're all gonna die!".

laughinghan• 10 years ago

But the shackles have come off. Where are all of these dramatic scientific findings that were suppressed?

The very article you're responding to mentions 3 specific examples of politically sensitive research that were affected by the policy, including the article's featured example about salmon.

The single example constantly floated is about a guy who got called by a reporter about a paper he released about slime mold.

Of the 4 examples mentioned in the original article (3 specific examples, 1 shark scientist mentioned in passing), none of them are this "constantly floated" example, it isn't even mentioned in passing. Nor is it mentioned in either of the articles that my sibling comment linked to.

This is a bizarre response.

osweiller9• 10 years ago

The very article you're responding to mentions 3 specific examples of politically sensitive research

But all three demonstrate nothing being suppressed. It points to two people who claim to have left their jobs (moved elsewhere/retired) because of these restrictions (although unburdened they apparently had no big reveal, or even an anecdote about anything being suppressed. But polar bears or something -- the casual allusion being entirely manipulative and intentional), and a salmon researcher who released all of their science, including publication in Science, but couldn't give soundbites as an official representative of the government of Canada. Exactly as I stated, this is a union/workplace issue, and people having grievances about workplace policies, with shockingly little to say about how it actually impacted science.

including its featured example about salmon.

That was the beginning (it was literally the first example of communications policies interfering in someone's feeling of being a freelancer). The salmon industry was already sensitive, and with great fanfare the PR circus began for a paper in Science. The government was sensitive about the misrepresentation of science, not about the science. Again, the paper was published. The science was documented. The same person was presenting at a Salmon inquiry. But they couldn't provide soundbites without it being considered and controlled.

EDIT: Two hours in, and for the many, many down arrows I've gotten by people showing how strongly they feel about this, it's notable that the combined examples of suppressed science catalogued thus far: ZERO.

apalmblad• 10 years ago

I remember speaking to my partner's cousin about this, a phd working in Ottawa for the federal government. No love lost between her and our previous federal government, so I figured I'd hear a great rant.

However, she figured it was turned into an issue by the media, and roughly supported the ban; her opinion - adjusted for brevity - being that scientists without media training shouldn't necessarily have carte blanche to speak to press.

osweiller9• 10 years ago

There is another post in this thread arguing that I'm speaking "partisan propaganda" (another a "mouthpiece of evil". How very theatrical) for my position. Which is a bit incredible given that I despised the Harper government, and personally lean to being a libertarian.

But at the same time I've considered the actual facts, coupled with the reality that mainstream media, when generalizing science, tends to do a really, really horrible job. The notion that the government wants to ensure the message is clear and coherent -- especially when it's given the weight of the government behind it -- given a free range of employees with their own quirks and communications issues, seems entirely rational.

snowwrestler8• 10 years ago

Media training is a specific thing that thousands of people go through every year--business leaders, nonprofit leaders, lawyers, activists, etc. Usually, following the training, those people then go talk directly to reporters.

If the Canadian rule had been shaped like that, probably no one would have objected much. Media training costs a bit of money and takes a day or two, usually--no big deal. But that's not what the rule was.

ocschwar2• 10 years ago

The government demanded that government employees get approval for any direct communications with media, etc.

FUCK that.

If my tax money is going to pay for your research work, and you want to speak to the public, I'm part of the public and I have a right to hear it. I will be the judge of whether your work is my money well spent, and I will be the judge of whether your public communications are time well spent, not some dipshit party hack.

homido• 10 years ago

Do you feel this way about defense contractors as well? Lets publish all of our top secret weapons and how to build nukes...

RodericDay• 10 years ago

There was a lot wrong with the prior government. An enormous amount.

What are some examples?

forgetsusername• 10 years ago

There was a lot wrong

People seem to have a hard time distinguishing between "I disagree" and "is wrong".

Politics, by their very nature, are partisan. I disagreed with many of the previous policies (and agreed with others), but it's hard to point to things that were out and out wrong.

wvenable3• 10 years ago

Cancelling the long form census for starters. It didn't even save any money, it just made it more difficult to make informed policy decisions.

jsprogrammer• 10 years ago

The government demanded that government employees get approval for any direct communications with media, etc. This all began when a researcher seriously impacted the salmon industry by releasing extremely preliminary results (that turned out to be wrong), on her own accord, making a name for herself. The media loves apocalyptic outcomes ("So would you say this means that we're all going to die?"), so of course it made headlines with the most dire of predictions.

Why should "the government" have any control over what "employees" say?

Everyone has the right to speak their mind and governments, in particular, should be defending that right, not attempting to suppress it.

You mention the media hyping what a particular person said, but that is a failure of that media and their readers to not jump to unsubstantiated conclusions. The real work that needs to be done is in the understanding of media, not in preventing the production of media.

chris_wot16• 10 years ago

That sounds like utter garbage. The article itself gives plenty of examples of the convoluted processes and restrictions that were applied on scientists.

Kristi Miller-Saunders, who was the principle author of the paper on Salmon death, wasn't allowed to speak to the media, but her non-government co-authors were.

And there is the giant hole in your argument. It's so large I could fly a jumbo jet through it. Scientists in universities are free to speak to the media! These scientists are employees of the university. They are not controlled by media departments. That is truly gagging debate!

It's funny how the government was happy for political media officers to control the message, officers who didn't understand the research as well as the lead author or researchers if scientific studies. Yet that is what you consider unbiased? I mean, your entire argument is that the government must protect the general public from misinformation yet it is the government who is deciding what the scientists can and cannot say... If they stop a scientist from speaking because they believe they are inaccurately explaining their own work, well that's absurd.

If the government is concerned that scientists can't communicate to the media, then I wonder when they might decide that scientists published papers might be potentially misleading and require a media officer to vet them. Peer review by public relations, if you will.

As for the slime mild story, could you tell us more? I don't see any mention of that in the story.

osweiller9• 10 years ago

"That sounds like utter garbage" - this will surely be a rational discourse...

"These scientists are employees of the university." - Ignoring that the relationship of university professors and so on are the result of a long process of give and take, that sample is irrelevant.

The government's concern are media reports quoting Government of Canada scientists. These tend to have more authority. And indeed the media was free to contact any other author of the Science research, and they could talk to industry scientists, and university professors. Exactly as I said (not sure how you think what I said is a "hole" in my own argument). But they didn't want anyone representing the government, with the weight of the government, being misrepresented.

"Some guy at some university says we're all going to die!" is decidedly less convincing, to most, than "Government of Canada environmental scientist says we're all going to die!".

And to your other comment, no one is saying the scientist will misrepresent their own work. But, and this may surprise you if you have utterly no knowledge of how media works, the media will if you aren't extremely careful with your statements and responses. The mainstream media has a surprising ability to misrepresent findings and research, and they just love to attach an authoritative name to it.

This whole discussion is exactly why it's impossible to touch anything remotely "political" on HN. No one has offered a single fact or counterpoint, but instead I've been attacked repeatedly, every benign comment is rapidly moderated down. Get a grip, partisans, and if you find it impossible to discuss something on your partisan talking radar without emotionally gravitating to a side, grow up.

ska2• 10 years ago

It's not really that simple. Even if you do have a problem with premature disclosure and bad quality journalism, you really can't ethically run this through the PR branch of a sitting government.

The purpose of federally funded scientific research is not and cannot be to support the policy objectives of the currently sitting government.

So a real answer to the putative problem might be to have an arms length communications office review communication for accuracy, but one that does not directly answer to the PMs office or federal PR. What Harper did was far more draconian than that. At the same time he initiated other damaging actions to federal science, so you can hardly fault people for not trusting the motives. He could have solved this easily by making things arms length, and chose not to, as well as choosing to be very opaque about the whole process. If for no other reason than that, his government deserves all the criticism it has had on this account.

osweiller9• 10 years ago

I don't disagree with this at all. The implementation was imperfect. It had the signature of political meddling (of the "we know better" type). It seemed poorly defined and inconsistent.

It should have been done in a very different way. It should have been more cooperative (e.g. "clarity officers" who have a masters in English or French, and who pour over statements and responses to ensure that it cannot be misinterpreted or misrepresented, without changing the core meaning).

The purpose of federally funded scientific research is not and cannot be to support the policy objectives of the currently sitting government.

There hasn't been a single example that had anything to do with the sitting government's policies or agenda. The government had no particular agenda regarding factory farming salmon or rock snot. Though from an overall government perspective for the health of an industry such as salmon (a cross-party industry), they want the message coherent.

danra• 10 years ago

It's like a Microsoft employee wrote about vulnerabilities in Windows on their private blog, offering to sell solutions.

A company controlling its employees' contact with the media in order to serve its business interests is not the same as publicly-funded government employees being gagged to serve some specific political party's interest and disserve the public interest.

evgen4• 10 years ago

Except the entire point of the OP was that in fact after nine years it turns out that there was no suppression and no shadowy cabal subverting the public interest.

akiselev• 10 years ago

Private sector employees are not the same as public servants. The very nature of parliamentary democracies and republics requires a level of transparency from those in power that does not apply to private organizations, which can only operate with security, stability, and privacy because of the nature of the modern state. Governments require some level of secrecy in order to protect economic competitiveness, defend their borders, and conduct intelligence activities but that is not what we're talking about here. Not only is the published science a public service, but the scientists are public servants whose purpose is to inform the public and policy makers. Unless you expect the public to read and understand every scientific paper, reporters' access to the scientists is absolutely necessary for the public to understand the consequences and potential of the resarch. Making scientific papers available to the public is not sufficient without allowing experts unfettered ability to provide nuance and explanation to that research.

You argue that there haven't been any bombshells after the restrictions were lifed but TFA literally talks about how reporters lost interest within twenty four hours because of administrative delays. Do you really expect a sensationalist, profit-driven media to go over years of backlogged information, to talk to thousands of people, when a few days delay was enough to have a massive chilling effect?

Everything you describe is a problem with the Canadian media, not government scientists. Would you support a law that requires journalists to submit all of their articles to majority coalition PR flacks for editing or do they get a special pass because they're "private"? (Which due to the weird nature of the CBC, they're not)

snowwrestler8• 10 years ago

This was not an independent researcher. This was not the private sector. This was someone directly employed by the government. It's like a Microsoft employee wrote about vulnerabilities in Windows on their private blog, offering to sell solutions.

Bad analogy, IMO. Microsoft is a private corporation. The government is a public entity, responsive directly to the people. A democratic government is supposed to be, IMO must be, transparent to be effective.

As to whether this impacted science, you only need to ask the scientists themselves. They say "yes."

But maybe you don't believe the scientists? If so, that would explain why you don't seem to have a problem with censoring them.

Bronobody• 10 years ago

Why is this at the top? Why would you ever need or want to suppress scientific evidence, to suppress the truth, unless you had an agenda? This comment feels like astroturfing.

HillRat• 10 years ago

The interesting thing about the didymo ("rock snot") paper isn't just that the government refused to allow the researcher to speak to the press, it's the massive amount of effort the government expended on what you -- quite rightly -- describe as a relatively trivial issue: "What [the interview request] did produce was 110 pages of emails to and from 16 different federal government communications operatives, according to documents obtained using access to information legislation."

When sixteen political minders exchange dozens or even hundreds of emails over a single media request, it tells me more about the political system than the scientific research.

kamran20• 10 years ago

At one point, a brawny ‘minder’ had actually accompanied her to a public hearing to make sure that she didn’t break the rules This kind of thing should NEVER be allowed to happen. The scientists are paid from public funds. That information is our right. This should upset anyone reading it.

Raphmedia• 10 years ago

I find it sad that from the title alone "Nine years of censorship", I was able to say to myself "oh, that's my country they are talking about! Canada!"

tdaltonc• 10 years ago

Maybe one day Springer, the publisher who owns Nature, will also stop suppressing scientific research.

duncan_bayne• 10 years ago

Those who live by the sword, die by the sword. In this case, the sword is State power.

Researchers are perfectly happy for the might of the State to underpin coercive taxation, because it directly funds their jobs. But they complain loudly enough when a fraction of that might is used to constrain their freedom of expression.

I think the move to un-muzzle State scientists is a good thing. But I have little sympathy for their complaints, either, given the way they're funded.

thesimpsons1022• 10 years ago

how does something like this happen in a "free" western country like Canada? And why isn't there more outrage about it? This is appalling to say the least. I knew I didn't like Harper but I didn't realize he was so totalitarian.

vkou• 10 years ago

There was plenty of outrage - alas, the Conservatives could secure a majority government with only 38% of the vote.

That 38% of the population doesn't care, or endorse this kind of behavior.

hackuser• 10 years ago

I read about it in the news at the time. I think the question is, how did so many overlook the story?

vacri• 10 years ago

Because 'free' is not a binary state in the real world. It's a multipolar concept with a great variety of greys in it.

Nine years of censorship

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