For two hundred years, global citizens have witnessed the ascent of scientific and technical information to become a key instrument in government decision-making. Over this time prominent scientists and scholars have issued warnings that scientific and technical information might not be the apolitical, impartial policy tool that it is typically represented as. Their warnings, that scientific information can be political and self-serving and not serve the wider interest of society, should be heeded.

PSGR's 2023 Discussion paper When does science become propaganda? What does this suggest for democracy seeks to encourage a discussion on a topic that is important but neglected. Information and intelligence used for policy and law in society, if it is to benefit society, must be impartial. Where there are financial or political conflicts of interest, there must be areas of resourced expertise that can act as a counter to those interests, so as to make decisions in the interest of society.

Technologies and their emissions are everywhere, in air, water, soil -all the way to the digital space, but there is no local monitoring or scientific research to triangulate the claims of the industry-paid scientists. Democracies have a stewardship problem, if there is no funding for independent science.

By convention, the information that supports the release onto the market and into the environment of technologies and their emissions is broadly controlled by the same industries that seek market access and re-authorisation of these products. There can be no assurance of safety if local, public-sector scientists do not have freedom and resources to monitor and assess how and why these technologies might cause harm over time.

Yet the scientific and technical information is designed for a political purpose, to secure entry onto a domestic market. When it is non-contestable, when there are no impartial arbiters, when the public more often identifies government claims as biased towards a commercial institution, it is not surprising that society becomes polarised.

Such scientific and technical information serves the political and financial interests of the institutions that produce it, when it is not subject to democratic scrutiny. When it is taken for granted as facts by political and bureaucratic elites, and used to convince society of safety, this information may be better classified as propaganda.

This issues paper draws on many New Zealand-based examples to highlight the persistent decoupling of the research, science and information system from research trajectories that might challenge or contradict powerful interests. However, this governance problem of capture is globally recognised. The dilemma in front of us extends beyond technologies, health and the environment. New Zealand research and science systems have been substantially eroded, some might say captured, so that New Zealand lacks the healthy, resilient informational systems – the intelligence - to support public knowledge, guide Parliament, government administration and the judiciary.

It’s necessary that these issues are broadly discussed and debated, as ignorance not only renders society powerless to reversing health harms and reversing the erosion of valuable resources, but ignorance increases potential for human rights abuses.

The ways governments and regulators design policies, and declare technologies are safe for public use, deserves much wider public scrutiny, if we are to remedy current trajectories of worsening health, corrupted political processes and civic disengagement.

CHAPTER 1. THE REGULATOR SAYS IT’S SAFE

For decades, communities of concerned citizens and expert communities cautiously and carefully methodologically review and present the scientific evidence of harm from a technology in public forums to the politicians representing their interests at local, regional and central government level. But after consulting with officials or the regulator, the elected politicians come back to them and declare that – ‘the regulator says it’s safe’, or the policy remains unaltered. The case is then closed. The concerned publics are dismissed via chains of officials who act as informational gatekeepers.

The scientific and scholarly literature is replete with descriptions of civic struggles as citizens and experts contest private industry supplied information and brittle policy processes that by not reflecting changing knowledges, ultimately defer to industry authority. These descriptions aim to contribute to the record and signal publicly, the complex issues which remain outside regulatory consideration [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. The technology might be a chemical or formulation [11, 12, 13]; a novel biotechnology [14, 15, 16, 17]; geoengineering [18] [19] [20]; digital governance infrastructure with AI [21]; or it might be wireless radiation [22, 23, 24].

No matter the extensive, elegantly produced, damning and eye-raising scientific research that would come after – such ‘out of scope’ scientific research studies are persistently dismissed as non-guideline; or irrelevant, while calls by expert scientists are met with silence.

Yet what is consensus, if the data is paid for by corporations with a financial conflict of interest and if governments actively suppress politically inconvenient and contradictory information?

Pick your technology and you’ll see a familiar pattern. Government officials judge safety based on sets of technicalities which revolve around the revision of linear toxicological science supplied by the relevant industry and limited modelling scenarios [25]. These specific studies enable the regulator to approve an acceptable level of risk or tolerance by humans of the technology. The product is then released onto the market. Commercial in-confidence agreements ensure the public cannot access the information – the market-science - which ensures market access for the technology. Monitoring and research are not undertaken to understand and update regulatory scientists on real world risk [26].

The private industry studies which fit inside the rules can be decades old and still support existing standards, no matter the contradictions in the scientific literature. For example, the World Health Organizations’ [27] current safe level for the herbicide glyphosate in drinking water is derived from an unpublished Monsanto study, set in 1985 [28]. Hundreds, if not thousands of studies in the scientific literature suggest that this herbicide is more harmful than presumed by chemical regulators. Extensive information has been unearthed in court cases. Yet there has been no revision of guidelines nor a budging of the claimed safe level in drinking water.

This information produced for the purpose of market access may be described as non-consensual, organised persuasive communication (propaganda).

‘For the information to be consensual it must contain the relevant information that can allow a rational and informed decision to be made… critical information should not be omitted or distorted in a way that leads an individual to be persuaded when otherwise, with the included or undistorted information, they would not be.’ [29, p. 11]

Our governments play a role in maintaining the status quo. The formalised rules and guidelines used to decide whether information is suitable for market access (or re-authorisation) purposes conventionally fail to impose obligations on government officials to also review published scientific literature. Officials and regulators are not required to consider court findings nor consider the risk from rapidly scaling up new technologies and then releasing them [30, 31]. Officials ignore and dismiss harm at endocrinologically relevant low-doses [32, 33], and other harm pathways, including mixture effects [34, 35, 36, 5, 37] and antibiotic effects [38]. Chemicals are withdrawn and replaced by ‘regrettable’ substitutes with similar characteristics. [39][40]

These gaps impact the ability to address big problems. Current ‘inequality’ and ‘equity’ tropes skate over the greater health burden suffered by low-income communities and the role of government agencies to limit harm [41]. From workplace exposures; to malnutrition from ultraprocessed diets; to detecting industrial and polluted sites [42, 43, 44, 45, 46], these issues are more difficult to identify and then remedy when robust, independent information is lacking. In New Zealand, it is easier to get livestock tested for toxic exposures than a recently exposed child.

Legislation and guidelines promote regulatory capture by ensuring that governing bodies and regulatory agencies are reliant on industry funding and are underfunded [47, 48, 49]. Governing bodies and regulators consequently by default arrange their activities around the service of granting and sustaining market access to their related industries.

The barriers to public appeal in New Zealand alone are extraordinary. Without scientific debate and scrutiny, and review across different domains of expertise, there can be no truth in the claim that a particular technology and/or its’ emissions are safe.

All too often, regulators are not given broader powers of inquiry, and the resources to carry out that inquiry in a fair and balanced way.

Judicial review of decisions which are inconsistent with principles in legislation do not happen. Court cases debating technical points might occur, but judges detest dealing with value-laden scientific controversies.

The absence of independent scientific communities also leaves judges, select committees and officials who might consider broader notions of risk, deferring to the very officials who may be heading the policy agenda. The very actors who are most likely to have a political conflict of interest. Their institutions may believe that the release of the technology will contribute to their institutions’ goals; or as regulators they may have long-term relationships with the corporations seeking approval for their technologies. Yet in a court case the judges will defer to their expertise as Crown agents.

These factors combine to produce a slanted weight of information supporting the market access and widespread integration of a given technology. Information is intelligence, yet it is geared to private industry selected and supplied intelligence.

However, it is not private industry that we should blame. It is a failure of governments to recognise the potential for abuse of power by highly predatory commercial interests and put in place governance architecture and resourcing which might counter-balance this power. It is the failure to lock in principles, and educate officials on how to make decisions in ambiguous, complex and uncertain environments, in the public interest.

The consequence in play in the early twenty-first century, is strategic, organisational communication across governance and regulatory landscapes which leave little space for controversies that contradict commercial priorities. In 1942, Talcott Parsons highlighted how institutions mesh or integrate with social environments to produce an interdependence. These institutions could not be considered in isolation.

‘Institutional patterns consist of norms defining what action and attitudes are legitimately expected of people, they are, in one aspect, actually part of the cultural tradition.’ [50]

The microprocesses, the patterns across the policy, science, and media communities can be studied to identify how central dogmas are produced and enforced. Laura Nader theorised that institutions at multiple sites cultivate and maintain central ideas of accepted taste and value. Nader described these controlling processes as:

‘the mechanisms by which ideas take hold and become institutional in relation to power.’ [51]

Controlling processes keep published scientific literature at arm’s length, even while scientific outcomes are heavily associated with the priorities of the research sponsors [52, 53].

This organised persuasive communication implies expert consensus. However, these practices inevitably deceive the public on safety, because contradictory science is excluded from official consideration. It theoretically justifies to the public that the technologies that society are exposed to in daily life, which society must accept, are safe.

Democracies are tasked with preventing abuse of power. The way governments achieve this is through requiring officials to act transparently and accountably. However, when it comes to information used to claim safety of technological inventions, processes of transparency and accountability are jettisoned.

For references and to continue reading: PSGR (2023) When does science become propaganda? What does this suggest for democracy? Bruning, J.R., Physicians & Scientists for Global Responsibility New Zealand. ISBN 978-0-473-68632-1

WHEN DOES SCIENCE BECOME PROPAGANDA?

CHAPTER 1. THE REGULATOR SAYS IT’S SAFE

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