{"id":775551,"date":"2024-05-07T08:30:26","date_gmt":"2024-05-07T12:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=775551"},"modified":"2024-05-07T08:53:19","modified_gmt":"2024-05-07T12:53:19","slug":"she-worked-in-animal-research-now-shes-blocked-from-commenting-on-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=775551","title":{"rendered":"‘For Patrick’: She worked in animal research, now she\u2019s blocked from commenting on it"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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After graduating, Madeline Krasno started commenting on social media about her monkey research experiences at her university lab by posting a photo of a tattoo she had gotten that said: 'for patrick', the name of the first baby monkey she cared for in the lab. Soon after, many of those comments mysteriously disappeared. After suing the university and the NIH, she discovered that both were removing and blocking her comments. Two courts have told her that it\u2019s not a violation, that the blocking of keywords such as 'animal testing' and related hashtags is a legal way of managing online conversations.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

RACHEL WEINER:<\/strong> For a long time, Madeline Krasno didn\u2019t tell other animal rights advocates that she had worked in a monkey research lab as a college student. It had taken her years to understand her nightmares and fragmented memories as signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. And some activists could be vicious to former lab workers.<\/em><\/p>\n

But four years after she graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Krasno started posting online about her experiences. Eventually, she started tagging the school in those posts and then commenting on its pages.<\/em><\/p>\n

Many of those comments disappeared. As she would later learn, it was not a mistake or a glitch. Both the university and the National Institutes of Health were blocking her comments. Now with support from free speech and animal rights organizations, she is suing both institutions.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re suppressing any kind of conversation on the issue,\u201d Krasno said in an interview while walking her dog, Millie. (She said she thinks of Millie as a person \u2014 and a soul mate \u2014 not a pet.) \u201cYou can\u2019t tell me that\u2019s not a free speech violation.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Two courts have told her that it\u2019s not a violation, that the blocking of keywords such as \u201canimal testing\u201d and related hashtags is a legal way of managing online conversations \u2014 the same way a local government can avoid chaotic town halls by deciding who speaks and on what topics. Both rulings are now on appeal and could go to the U.S. Supreme Court.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cCourts are just starting to dig into the parameters of free speech online,\u201d said lawyer Stephanie Krent of the Knight First Amendment Institute, who argued NIH\u2019s case in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit last week. Courts have said officials \u2014 including former president Donald Trump \u2014 can\u2019t muzzle criticism online. But they haven\u2019t said what the limits are when the government is allowed to moderate.<\/em><\/p>\n

The lab in Madison where Krasno worked was named after Harry Harlow, a pioneering psychologist whose work upended harmful beliefs that too much tenderness would soften children\u2019s minds. On the contrary, he found, neglect and isolation were liable to make children grow up angry and violent; mothers who had been traumatized were liable to became neglectful or abusive toward their children.<\/em><\/p>\n

He came to those conclusions through experiments on rhesus monkeys. Some were separated early from their mothers and given a choice between a doll made of cloth or one made of wire. Some were left for months in a box he called the \u201cpit of despair\u201d; female monkeys were forced to copulate by being tied to a device he called \u201cthe rape rack.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Harlow\u2019s name, along with that of a scientist who worked with him, are on NIH\u2019s list of banned words. So are \u201canimals,\u201d \u201ccruelty,\u201d \u201cmonkeys,\u201d \u201crevolting,\u201d \u201ctesting\u201d and \u201ctorture.\u201d After Krasno\u2019s lawsuit was filed, \u201cPETA,\u201d \u201c#stopanimaltesting,\u201d \u201c#stoptesting\u201d and \u201c#stoptestingonanimals\u201d were taken off the list of banned words.<\/em><\/p>\n

NIH said it chose those words because they were the ones most commonly used in off-topic, repetitive comments. For example, an Instagram post on sickle-cell anemia prompted more than five dozen comments that were variations on \u201c#animalabuser,\u201d although the research highlighted did not involve animal testing.<\/em><\/p>\n

Krasno, now 33, worked in the Harlow lab decades after his death and was never directly involved in research. She was a student caretaker for the hours when scientists and their assistants were off-duty. Immediately, she says, she had some awareness that what she was seeing was wrong. On her first day at the lab, she was taken to the one cage that housed multiple macaques. Her supervisor gave her some peanuts and showed her how to hand the treats through the bars.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThey were so excited,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re living in basically dungeons \u2014 windowless rooms where the lighting half the time wasn\u2019t working, where the drains weren\u2019t working. A peanut is all they have to live for.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Other monkeys were caged alone, she said. While mothers were not separated from their babies the way Harlow\u2019s test subjects had been, Krasno said the mothers often rejected their offspring or failed to properly nurse them because they had not learned from older monkeys in the wild. Though they weren\u2019t tied down, she said, female monkeys were clearly traumatized by being put into cages with unfamiliar males for breeding: \u201cYou would hear screaming”…<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2017, Krasno posted on Instagram a photo of a tattoo she had gotten that said: \u201cfor patrick\u201d \u2014 the name of the first baby monkey she cared for in the lab. And she started intermittently describing her experiences.<\/em><\/p>\n

At first, it was her ideological allies who responded negatively, saying she was a psychopath for having worked in animal research. \u201cSome of the worst things that have been said to me have come from animal rights activists,\u201d Krasno said. But she noticed that when she tagged her alma mater in posts, the school removed the notation. Feeling she had hit a nerve, she started commenting on the school\u2019s Facebook and Instagram pages. The comments disappeared. So did her comments on NIH\u2019s pages. SOURCE…<\/strong><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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