As you probably did not know, this is Through With Chew Week, an annual outburst of propaganda aimed at scaring people away from smokeless tobacco with warnings that are exaggerated, misleading, and in some cases simply false. Last week the Department of Defense anticipated the occasion by tweeting that "smokeless tobacco users are 50x more likely to get cheek, gum & mouth cancer vs. nonusers." That 50-times factoid, which dates back to a frequently misrepresented subanalysis in a 38-year-old study, lives on the border between highly misleading and flatly untrue. In this formulation it crosses that border.
Brad Rodu, a professor of medicine at the University of Louisville and a longtime advocate of smokeless tobacco as a harm-reducing alternative to cigarettes, has repeatedly tried to set the record straight on this talking point, and last Friday he tried again. "Your 50 claim is a complete fabrication by a staffer @theNCI," he tweeted back to the Defense Department's @ucanquit2 account. "Here is the explanation:
https://tinyurl.com/yxjsnugd. Furthermore, a large federally-funded study documented that men who dip/chew had ZERO excess risk for mouth cancer. ZERO. http://tinyurl.com/hd8nd49."
After Rodu's reply, some weird things began to happen on Twitter. You can still see his tweet, but it does not show up in Twitter's search engine, although other posts by Rodu are still searchable. More than two dozen people who retweeted Rodu's correction of the Defense Department complained that their accounts were suddenly disfavored in several ways: Their handles did not show up as suggestions in searches for their accounts, their tweets were no longer searchable, and their reply tweets were hidden from other users. Complaints to Twitter Support, including one from Rodu, so far have gone unanswered. I emailed Twitter's press office about the complaints but have not heard back yet.
