Talk:Ag-gag

Tone of "Support" Section

Anyone else have a problem with the first paragraph of the Support section ("Proponents of these types of laws are pro-animal...") Unless someone can find an animal welfare group that actually considers these laws a good thing, that seems pretty dubious.Kiravae (talk) 06:19, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

As this first paragraph was just added, is not supported, and directly contradicted by the "Opposition" section, I just went ahead and rolled it back.Kiravae (talk) 06:40, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Who coined the term "ag gag"?

The article credits an April 26, 2011, column by Mark Bittman. This appears to be wrong. The term occurs in the title of a posting on Wayne Pacelle's blog A Humane Nation, dated April 14, 2011: "'Ag Gag' Laws Would Punish Whistleblowers, Protect Animal Abusers", hsus.typepad.com/wayne/2011/04/nytimes-whistleblowers.html. I don't know if this is the coining occurrence or if earlier uses can be found.  --Lambiam 09:27, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Sheesh, good question. Headline puns spread like an epidemic; finding a "pun zero" would be just as difficult (and for the same reasons). Honestly I think we should avoid the attribution unless we have a reliable source that states that they did the research and found the first person. Not to be a schmuck but if we do otherwise I think we'd be dipping our toe in the OR pool and we would probably end up factually wrong, also. Anyone else have any ideas or feedback? Jay Dubya (talk) 19:46, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Agreed with JayDubya. I'd also like to say that the article seems a bit outdated in places. There must be some more recent developments that could go into the article. Alt lys er svunnet hen (talk) 02:19, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

I'm looking at a book by John Ayato, A Century of New Words, 2007, Oxford UP. Ag-gag is not there. (Perhaps his other books have it.) But a more serious WP policy issue is involved. If "ag-gag" has been developed and promoted by people who do not like these anti-whistleblower laws, then we are violating WP:POVTITLE. I suggest a new title (and article re-write) along the lines of Food libel laws. – S. Rich (talk) 02:37, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

Per the section below I've stated an RFC on the question. Further comments should go into the RFC (once the bot sets up notifications. – S. Rich (talk) 05:36, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Australia

Australia WA shouldn't be in this article, they have literally the opposite of an Ag-Gag Law, where you must report abuse. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 148.64.2.181 (talk) 23:26, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Australian state South Australia is also planning to introduce Ag-Gag. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.245.49.25 (talk) 10:27, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Minnesota

I added a blurb at the end of the MN section, as that bill appears to be dead, and I had a source, but messed up the cite. I'll try to fix it soon. Alt lys er svunnet hen (talk) 02:15, 30 January 2015 (UTC)

RFC regarding article title

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the debate may be found at the bottom of the discussion.

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No consensus to Move and redirect to Anti-whistleblower legislation - The main concern throughout seems to be that that would be too broad a name (such as pointing out that the Ag in the name refers to Agriculture, in particular, Intensive farming practices such as Industrial agriculture and industrial livestock production). And while there was general consensus that the current name may be inappropriate, there was no consensus on what the name for an article detailing anti-whistleblower legislation related to such practices should be. As such, there is no prejudice against starting a subsequent discussion for that. - jc37 21:05, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

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Does the present article title comply with WP:POVTITLE? If not, what changes are needed? 05:32, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

• Move and redirect to Anti-whistleblower legislation, while keeping 'ag gag' as a bolded synonym in the lead.. This term is also commonly used and is a more neutral synonym. Darx9url (talk) 02:02, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
• Move and redirect, with bold name, per above. I agree that it is a more neutral page name. However, I have a question as to whether the page name might need to be more specific, in that the page is specifically about agricultural whistleblowing, rather than whistleblowing in general. I'd rather not make the page name longer than it needs to be, so I guess it's a balance between brevity and precision, and I am ambivalent about that. --Tryptofish (talk) 16:33, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
• Undecided but strongly leaning to the status quo - The bot sent me. I am seeing plenty of Google hits for "Ag-gag" but I created the redirect ahead of the proposed move anyway. My personal opinion is that these laws are so abhorrent, antithetical to the well-known and well-understood ideals of the Founders, protective of corporate profit interests so far above the interests of individuals, and so absurd in the context of increasing food borne illnesses, that any attempt to address bias in the descriptive short title is not just absurd on its face, but an insult to the intelligence of decent editors. EllenCT (talk) 05:01, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Creating a redirect before this RFC is resolved only creates problems. I have requested speedy deletion. Let's figure out what the result of the RFC is before we start creating redirects which may end up in circular redirects. With this in mind, I think Anti-whistleblower laws may be the better article topic. "Legislation" implies that the laws are simply proposed, not enacted. – S. Rich (talk) 05:10, 14 February 2015 (UTC)15:57, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

• Move and redirect Per Darx9url. This is a POV mess. Capitalismojo (talk) 18:13, 15 February 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose renaming to Anti-whistleblower legislation, as that title is far too general. The topic of this article is specifically legislation making it a felony to expose abusive industrial-agricultural practices. There are a host of legal clauses that can be used to prosecute whistleblowers exposing other forms of abuse, such as Chelsea Manning (charged with 22 offences, including violations of Articles 92 and 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Espionage Act) and Edward Snowden (charged with theft of government property and also violating the Espionage Act), but they are not covered by this article – nor should they.  --Lambiam 19:29, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

Comment – Thanks. Your concern with the broadness of "Anti-whistleblower legislation/laws" is one I share. (Hence I started this RFC.) How about this: at present we have Whistleblower protection in the United States, a rather poorly done unassessed class article. Change the title on that article to Whistleblower laws in the United States and then incorporate the material here into the article. At that point we can then WP:BLAR this article. – S. Rich (talk) 19:54, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

• POV title Ag-gag is a moniker that typically appears be used by those who are opposed to such laws, so that's my main indication against NPOV. Whistleblower is a less POV term, but calling these anti-whistleblower laws could also be problematic as it can also be used in an advocacy sense. Not allowing video recording vs. reporting a problem are two very different things, so it might be a stretch to call this anti-whistleblowing as well. Other POV issues in this article, but I'll ruminate on this all for a bit. For now, definitely a POV title, but I wouldn't suggest a merge and redirect to a more general article yet. Kingofaces43 (talk) 23:49, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

How about my suggestion (above) to put into Whistleblower laws in the United States? If we get consensus I'll do the legwork. – S. Rich (talk) 04:43, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

That gets into the more general problem I was describing above of whether to actually call something whistleblowing and whether it's getting too far into an advocacy point of view. The main issue though I see with your idea would be that such an article would be very broad, and this is already an article with a lot of content. I could always be convinced by a rough draft that looks convincing though. For now now though, I think merging into a broader topic would be too problematic even disregarding the whistleblower POV aspect and that thinking of a different name for this article might be the best course of action. I don't have a suggestion for that course action yet though, so I'll think about options in that route in the meantime and mention it here if I have any new ideas. Kingofaces43 (talk) 20:27, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose renaming to Anti-whistleblower legislation. I don't agree that the article name is inherently NPOV. It seems to fall under "non-neutral but common names." Ag-gag laws, whether you agree with them or not, aren't commonly known by any other name. There seems to be a great deal of well-sourced material on this unique type of legislation. Meanwhile, Anti-whistleblower legislation redirects to Ag Gag, which makes me question whether there is even an article there for Ag Gag to be absorbed into. KingofAces43 mentioned above that "Ag Gag" is a moniker mostly used by those opposed to these new laws. I posit that there is no other widely-recognized term, and that this issue deserves an article in it's own right. If you've got something better to call it than Ag Gag, then find a RS that supports it. Otherwise, lets concentrate on correcting the article's real flaws. Alt lys er svunnet hen (talk) 05:26, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Reply (by OP). The term "ag-gag" may be known amongst the media, but I venture it is not commonly known. E.g., if you asked Jane or John Doe "what is ag-gag?" you'd get a blank stare. If you asked "what is anti-whistleblower legislation?" you'd get a more or less thoughtful answer. In any event we don't have data to support "common usage" for either of these. But repeating "ag-gag" as the article title serves to permit WP to act as the platform for those who criticize "ag-gag". Lastly, the redirect you see was created by one of the commentators on this page – and it was created while the discussion was on-going. (Thanks for your comment.) – S. Rich (talk) 06:40, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

I definitely agree that the term is overused in the article - 37 out of about 5400 words, I think. Certainly the article should be revised to reduce this redundancy. That being said, when I type in "anti-whistleblower laws" or "anti whistleblower legislation," all I see is a redirect to Ag-Gag. While Ag Gag certainly falls under the category of anti-whistleblower legislation, I also believe it is unique and reasonably-sourced enough to merit it's own, separate article. Let's face it, whistleblowing is a broad category and is only going to grow. Yet, there is nothing on Whistleblower about AWL. So until we get AWL to stand by itself, including all the non-agricultural aspects of whistleblowers, I don't see why this article shouldn't stand by itself. Even then, Ag Gag should be a subsection within AWL with a link back to this article. I can already see AWL ballooning to cover all whistleblowers in all industries, with agricultural being one subsection among many. Even if we do merge to any of the whistleblower articles - that doesn't resolve the problem of what to call it. (My own opinion here, but isn't the whole thing kind of a gag order? So to some extent, the term is accurate in describing the effects of the laws? Otherwise we're reduced to "Whistleblowing in the Agricultural Industry" or some other such subtitle. Is that what we're going for?) In any case, let's correct the redundancies and other unencyclopedic aspects of this article before combining it into some other article that doesn't even exist. <> Alt lys er svunnet hen (talk) 03:07, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Neutrality problems

This article appears to be written from the perspective of whistleblowers. Even the "Support" section has more content describing animal abuse than anything about reasons for support. I'm not knowledgeable enough of the topic to help out with this but there must be other reasons for the laws besides business impacts. Privacy and property rights, for example? Jojalozzo (talk) 01:44, 6 February 2015 (UTC)

What makes you think there must be other reasons?  --Lambiam 19:32, 15 February 2015 (UTC)

The "support" section is clearly biased. Most of it would be more appropriate for the "opposition" section. The "opposition" section should be renamed "criticism." I think one problem with this article is that in order to make it unbiased, we need more reliable sources from the supporters of this legislation. Maybe some evidence of the benefits. Any analysis at all would be great, but it's just not there. Those sources are not easy to find, and the language they use isn't easy to work into an encyclopedic article. Unless people do the dirty work of researching the agro-industry's spin on these laws -- and the legal and ethical justifications for them -- this article is doomed to be accused of bias. There's plenty of sources on the cons, but not much on the pros. In the case of my state of MN, along with many others, these ag gag laws ended up going nowhere. Not many news sources on why this is, or where it's going to go from here. That's one reason I don't believe this article should simply be assimilated into some black-hole article about anti-whistleblower legislation. We don't know if this was a historical blip, or part of a bigger trend. Anyway, if anyone can find a better name, please post it. Alt lys er svunnet hen (talk) 05:58, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

There is also not much on the pro side in our articles on Cannibalism and White supremacy. Does that imply they are biased? Should we try to balance out the cons with sources on the pros also there to adhere to a neutral point of view?  --Lambiam 14:37, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

If either were written from an WP:ADVOCACY perspective, then that would be bias problem. There are often political undercurrents in ag topics like these trying to guise things as something people are more likely to be passionate about. Ag-gag definitely does that, and anti-whistleblower to an extent. There's a lot intertwined into the topic and doesn't make it so simple such as PETA-esque groups sneaking onto farms and posting videos with cherry-picked shots and narration to make things look much worse than they actually are, etc. That gets into the actions of WP:FRINGE groups though, which gets even trickier to handle. That's why at least for now I'm saying there are very legitimate NPOV concerns, but tackling them would require a bit more time and thought. Kingofaces43 (talk) 16:33, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Ag laws are usually part of lobbying efforts 1ChristopheT (talk) 05:29, 1 June 2015 (UTC)

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Organization of the Article

Since we are no longer in the heyday of Ag-gag bills being introduced in various state legislatures, I think this article would benefit from focusing on the laws that are in place right now (Kansas, North Dakota, Montana, Iowa, Utah, Missouri, Tennessee and North Carolina; should probably include the currently-overturned law in Idaho as well, since there's a non-zero chance that the law is reinstated on appeal) at the top of the article. The information provided by this article about the failed legislative proposals in various jurisdictions is definitely interesting and important, but the presence of that information should not distract someone who comes to this article to learn the current state of affairs with respect to ag-gag laws. AlexanderGerten (talk) 03:06, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

Copyright problem removed

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Survey

Hi, there is a survey of pork farmers that oddly doesn't report on the number of farmers. Instead, it lists a percentage of the industry affected by sow population. Since the Australian pig farming industry is dominated by only a few giant farms, this could easily mislead the reader into thinking that a large number of farms was affected, instead of just a few large farms. I've tried to give context to this survey, but it came out pretty clunky. Thoughts? Mariolovr (talk) 01:13, 17 September 2020 (UTC)