> I recently . . . [tried to] promote awareness of a paper
> by Stephanie Seneff and Anthony Samsel that details
> mechanisms by which glyphosate [a principal component
> of Monsanto's Roundup seed] may contribute to diseases
> that have reached epidemic proportions since GMOs
> were introduced . . .
> http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/4/1416
> . . . . [but my postings to the Mother Jones and Business
> Week sites disappeared soon after I posted them.] I
> suspect that disqus is the culprit here but, of course,
> I have no way of knowing. At the very least this
> does suggest that it is possible to manipulate on line
> discussions in a disturbing way.
I confess to being less interested in speculating why the attempted comment posting was unsuccessful than in the culpability of being willing to try to promote the Seneff-Samsel article. Nonetheless, an, "Anything is possible!" speculative alternative, which of course we have no way of knowing, is that disqus or the operators of the web sites referred to made a sensible decision not to invite litigation by Monsanto which could have had the effect of putting them in the position of having to try to defend a worse than "junk science" publication? At the very least this is possible.
> The biochemistry in this paper is a bit intense . . . .
The biochemistry in this paper is more than a bit lacking. Which is why it has been justifiably debunked. But it does recall though in an apparently unintentional way lacking in humor the deliberate Richard Sokal hoax.*
( * See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair )
In How Most Unlikely To Persuade? terms, one might think that citations to and any form of reliance on this this bit of putative science writing (the authors did not claim they were capable of doing much less that they did any actual scientific research) to argue against GMO agriculture and food in general or against Monsanto in particular is (to borrow a phrase from the paper's summary) a "textbook example" of rhetorically shooting oneself in the foot (although the use in this self-parody of a peer reviewed biochemistry paper's "abstract" of the locution "exogenous semiotic entropy" would be at least droll if the authors did not attempt to use it seriously).