In theory, universities should offer an environment for robust scholarly debates on scientific controversies. In contrast, dissident scholars experience scientific suppression driven by the overlapping interests of orthodox academics, embedded media and their business funders. Their collaboration creates the negative phenomenon of ‘undone science’, where research into promising interventions is prevented or suppressed.

This is evident in the lack of debate in universities around Insulin Resistance versus the orthodox “cholesterol” model of chronic disease development. It is also obvious in how effective, but inexpensive, COVID-19 preventative treatments have been ignored in favor of costly, but largely ineffective, mRNA inoculations.

Increased public visibility on social media has many risks. This theme tackles two major concerns:

1. Professor Noakes and Travis have defined how Higher Education scholars negotiate ‘online academic bullying’ when they face ‘excessive, one-sided critiques online, surpassing the confines of typical scholarly debate and accepted standards within their respective fields’ (2021). In response to the gravity of this negative phenomenon, TNF supports research into a definitive OAB framework’s development. It is hoped that this can assist decision makers with reducing academic cyberbullying.

2. Well-known health experts’ identities are also stolen for fake celebrity endorsement of “keto gummies” and other scams. In response to the identity jacking of Professor Noakes, TNF launched reportfakeendorsement.com to grow awareness of this decade-long cybercrime. Scholars are currently researching what makes fake celebrity endorsements a seemingly intractable problem, and how the biggest social media companies have responded to celebrities’ complaints.

The Noakes Foundation is a founder sponsor of the Social Media and Internet Lab for Research (SMILR), which is based at Younglings Africa (YA). SMILR supports the post-graduate research pipeline with affordable data extraction by YA interns learning to do this via X (formerly Twitter), for Masters and PhD research projects. SMILR is being used by CPUT PhD candidate, Pinky Motshware, who is researching the historic cyber harassment of black male South African celebrities on Twitter (now X).

Each experienced a life-changing outcome as a consequence of such harassment. In the long term, this theme intends to develop a case study for a successful sustainable site that supports small data research projects for the digital humanities and it was founded in 2021

A blind spot exists in scholarship regarding the use of non-consensual persuasion techniques for promoting experimental treatments. Drawing upon a conceptual framework that distinguishes between consensual and non-consensual organisation persuasive communication (OPC) this paper shows how deceptive messaging, incentivization and coercion meant that consent to take the COVID-19 vaccine was not fully informed nor freely given. Specifically, in South Africa, people were incentivized through financial inducements, coerced by employment policies involving mandatory testing and, in the case of pregnant women, misled by inaccurate claims regarding mRNA vaccine safety. In addition, key definitional changes to what was meant by a ‘vaccine’ and a ‘pandemic’ enabled the rapid roll out and promotion of genetic vaccines, including Pfizer’s BioNTech Comirnaty®. The case study findings highlight how health campaigns can involve persuasion strategies that are non-consensual. It is particularly concerning that strategies involving incentivization ran alongside misleading claims regarding vaccine safety for pregnant women. The wider question raised by the study relates to whether non-consensual strategies emerged due to overzealous drives to protect the wider public good or are more accurately understood to have been influenced by political and economic interests. More research is needed into this important question.