Last November, I reported on the EU’s plan to force member states to levy punitive taxes on e-cigarette fluid and nicotine pouches. The European Commission launched a public consultation which received 18,480 responses, overwhelmingly from consumers who were against. Having lost the numbers game, anti-nicotine NGOs went running to Politico who published an article claiming that the consultation had been “swamped with pro-industry feedback”. Citing an unpublished analysis from a mysterious new “tobacco control consultancy” called Impact Unfiltered, it alleged that “thousands of the posts use terms created only by the [tobacco] sector”, including the phrases “harm reduction” and “illicit trade”.
As I noted at the time, Impact Unfiltered is an offshoot of the smugly named School for Moral Ambition which is run by the equally smug left-wing polemicist Rutger Bregman who inexplicably gave the BBC’s Reith Lectures last year. Neither organisation is on the EU’s Transparency Register, but Impact Unfiltered only seems to have two employees and they are both graduates of the School for Moral Ambition’s “Tobacco Free Future” internship courtesy of money from the fanatical anti-nicotine billionaire Michael Bloomberg via two of his many front groups.
If the Politico article is any guide, Impact Unfiltered’s evidence that the consultation was subverted by spam is extremely weak. The term “harm reduction” has been used in public health for decades, and the “illicit trade” is a common synonym for the black market. Neither of them was coined by the tobacco industry. Vapes and pouches demonstrably reduce harm when smokers switch to them and high taxes on popular products demonstrably fuel the illicit trade. You are free to challenge these arguments (or “talking points” as Politico calls them), but they are fairly obvious arguments for normal people to make in a consultation about taxing safer nicotine products.
Furthermore, while the consultation may have attracted more responses than average, 18,480 responses doesn’t seem that much when you consider that the new taxes will affect tens of millions of people. You’d expect a professional bot-farming operation to generate a lot more than that.
The fact is that people are more likely to respond to a consultation if it affects their day-to-day life in a tangible way. In 2018, an EU consultation on daylight saving time received 4.6 million responses. No conspiracy was required and no conspiracy is required to get 18,000 people to tell the EU where it can shove its vape tax, but that didn’t stop Rutger Bregman going on a rant on LinkedIn, saying …
This is what democratic hijacking looks like. Big Tobacco lobbyists cite these ‘consultation results’ to European politicians as proof that EU citizens oppose tobacco taxes – even though those ‘citizens’ are corporate sock puppets… I find it hard to express how sick this industry is. We’ve known for decades that they lie and lie and lie. That they ruthlessly target children, and manipulate the science. But corrupting democratic processes themselves? That’s a new low.
Politico returned to the story this week. Under the headline “EU Commission suspects ‘coordinated’ interference in tobacco tax feedback”, it once again complained about “thousands of anonymous submissions promoting pro-tobacco industry arguments” and claimed that the European Commission “suspects that a massive tranche of pro-industry comments on the EU’s proposed tobacco tax hike was ‘probably’ a coordinated attempt to distort public feedback.” It quoted David Boublil from the European Commission’s tax department — who spoke at an anti-vaping meeting in Brussels on Tuesday — saying that “some of the submissions were probably submitted in a coordinated manner and not necessarily representing individual views”. In the Politico newsletter, Joachim Verheyen from Impact Unfiltered suggested that the Commission should “disregard the consultation results”.
All this, remember, because a tiny fraction of the EU population had expressed displeasure at the prospect of paying more for their vape juice.
Within hours of the Politico newsletter going out, the claims upon which it rested had been debunked. Journalists at Clearing The Air, a website about harm reduction (there’s that phrase again), put some research online that they had been working on for weeks. Using large language models, they analysed the consultation responses (which are publicly available) and found no sign of bots being used. There was very little of the text repetition that you would expect from bots, nor were there suspicious deluges of submissions at certain times. The supposedly fishy terms “harm reduction” and “illicit trade” were each used in fewer than 1,500 submissions, not in more than 6,000, as Impact Unfiltered claimed. Those who responded were more likely to use the colloquial terms “less harmful” and “black market”.
Nor were any of the submissions “anonymous” in the sense that no one knows who they are. To submit a response, people had to create an account with an e-mail address and two-factor verification. They had to give their name and location, but they also had the option of not making this information public. EU citizens provided 93.2 per cent of the responses. Responses from NGOs made up 0.5 per cent of the total and NGOs were the only group to offer majority support for the Commission’s proposals.
On one point, Clearing the Air agrees with Impact Unfiltered. There was some coordination in the responses. Consumers and retailers spread the news that the EU was going to tax their products and urged people to respond. The link to the consultation was shared. In a few cases, lines to take were suggested. This is all common practice for online consultations. In 2021, the EU’s public consultation on Sustainable Corporate Governance received 473,461 responses. According to Clearing the Air, 99.9 per cent came from online copy and paste feedback boxes created by big NGOs such as Friends of the Earth. In the nicotine tax consultation, only 133 responses came via such routes. In neither case was there any evidence that they were ‘bots’ or “corporate sock puppets”.
Isn’t this what the European Commission wants? Isn’t the EU all about “stakeholder engagement” and “active citizenship”? Of course not. In practice, the only stakeholders it cares about are compliant NGOs in the Brussels bubble while citizens are only tolerated so long as they don’t become too active.
