Health quacks like Mehmet Oz and Joe Mercola have built large empires by doing exactly this with a variety of issues, while getting rich off of selling snake-oil-esque “miracle cures” that have no scientific backing: the same products sold by GOOP and Alex Jones.

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The problem is that there are real problems that people are facing: developmental disorders, diseases, environmental pollution, neurodivergences, etc. But instead of focusing their efforts on understanding and combating these problems, the act of concern trolling instead diverts attention and money toward the imagined, phantasmal causes of these charlatans.

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A similar story of concern trolling has led to a prolonged epidemic of Vitamin A deficiency in a number of countries… In 2013 in the Philippines, where 1.7 million children suffer from Vitamin A deficiency, driven by a concern troll campaign that targeted all genetic modifications (i.e., anti-GMO propaganda), an entire field of Golden Rice was destroyed by a group of 400 protestors. This was part of a trial plot that was about to be submitted for evaluation; the protestors were confident that they had saved their nation from the horrors of GMOs. Instead of Golden Rice beginning commercial production in 2014, as was previously planned, this delayed the onset of commercial production until 2021, leading to an extra 7 years of unnecessary, preventable instances of blindness, disease, and death among Filipino children.

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