Viewpoint: Documentary ‘Modified’ peddles falsehoods about GMOs, pesticides and ‘corporate control’ of food

Henry Miller, Kathleen Hefferon | October 21, 2019

Propaganda has been manufactured and promulgated through the ages, and in modern times it flourished during the Great Depression and World War II when useful lies became preferred to harmful truths.

That still rings true today, with the explosion of propaganda wars aided by the Internet, texting, social media, and the emergence of Internet-based trolls and bots. A U.S. Senate-commissioned analysis by a cybersecurity firm released last December found that Russia’s infamous troll factory, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), is conducting “relentless modern information warfare.” Renee DiResta, the research director of the firm, described the IRA’s battle plan as a “cross-platform attack that made use of numerous features on each social network and that spanned the entire social ecosystem.”

The targets of those attacks include not only certain political campaigns, but also products or technologies at which the U.S. is preeminent, such as fracking, genetic engineering, and vaccine development.

Often financed by the organic agriculture and food and “natural products” industries, activists in the West have been mobilized to sow suspicion about and aversion to modern genetic engineering in agriculture — the production of so-called “genetically modified organisms,” or “GMOs.” (See numerous examples here)..........To Read More....