St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Oct. 20

There’s an eerie familiarity to charges that vaping companies are luring kids

In years past, cigarette companies were caught using deceptive advertising and youth-targeted campaigns like the cartoonish “Joe Camel” to peddle their deadly products. In a parallel development with a modern twist, e-cigarette companies now stand accused of using bot-generated social-media campaigns to ensnare young buyers into the world of vaping.

Federal regulators should make sure they don’t get blinded by the technology here. High-tech or not, the same standards that governed deceptive cigarette advertising should apply.

Bots are non-human social-media accounts that automatically generate messages, repost content and carry out other tasks to promote certain products or views in ways that make it appear to be coming from individuals rather than computer algorithms. The devastating effects of bot-driven campaigns were demonstrated in the 2016 election, when Russia used them to spread misinformation in its efforts to throw the election to Donald Trump. As a relatively new technology, bots are currently unregulated.

Now a congressional committee and the Massachusetts attorney general are investigating whether millions of social-media messages generated by automated bots have misled consumers about health issues related to vaping. The Wall Street Journal reports that part of the investigation is aimed at determining whether bot-generated campaigns have specifically targeted minors - one of the most damning practices of the tobacco industry of yesteryear.

Once viewed as a safe alternative to cigarettes, e-cigarettes are undergoing new scrutiny after the recent deaths of more than two dozen people, apparently from vaping-related lung illnesses. More than 1,200 others have fallen ill. While the illnesses aren’t yet fully understood - and while vaping is clearly nowhere near as harmful as cigarettes - none of this indicates it’s a good idea to let young people be aggressively pulled into the e-cigarette fold.

The controversy over the marketing of vaping products ties into a larger debate over the bots themselves. They are deceptive by their nature, amplifying messages (including though not limited to misinformation) in ways that can make it appear there is a groundswell of popularity for a product or viewpoint when there actually isn’t.

California has passed a law requiring that bots be designed to disclose that they are automated rather than human responses. There have been calls for similar action at the federal level, which is an idea worth pursuing. High-tech aspects aside, to require disclosing when products or campaigns are being pushed by bots as opposed to people wouldn’t be fundamentally different from other consumer-protection laws that require honesty and transparency in dealing with the public.

As for the marketing of e-cigarettes: The more things change, the more they remain the same, as the old saying goes. If e-cigarette companies are in fact spreading misinformation and luring kids, it doesn’t matter whether it’s via bots, traditional advertisements or quill pens and parchment - it needs to stop.

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The Joplin Globe, Oct. 20

Student test scores for 2019 and other measures that are factored in to a public school district’s annual accreditation were released to the public Thursday by the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

In past years, getting a snapshot view of how a school district is performing was easy. The state reported the total number and percentage of points that districts received in the overall process, something akin to a letter grade that students are familiar with on their homework and tests. Anyone who wanted specifics could drill down into the supporting data.

But this year, it doesn’t seem so simple. The state isn’t releasing that total number and percentage for districts.

And if you can even navigate yourself to the data portal on the state department’s website, you might think that a PDF labeled “2019 District APR Summary Report” - APR stands for Annual Performance Report - would be your best bet for quick information.

You’d be right, but the presentation won’t be what you’re expecting. You’ll find yourself, for any given school district, staring at a page of colored bands, with labels such as “floor” or “approaching” being used to describe the district’s performance in English and math.

What does any of that mean? There are keys and legends available, and a video tutorial for first-time users, but the overall effect isn’t user-friendly.

State officials said last week that they want to give parents data about their schools that is meaningful to them. They want people to look beyond a single number to determine their school’s performance.

“We’ve heard from so many people, ‘Our schools are more than test scores,’” said Margie Vandeven, commissioner of the state board of education, as quoted by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Associated Press.

To be clear, we understand that perfectly. We agree that test scores should not be the final word on school performance, particularly when there are so many factors that contribute to how students perform on those tests.

But for reporting that information to the public, we prefer a hybrid approach for ease of use. Give us an easy-to-digest snapshot of performance using the language and concepts that most of us understand - such as a letter grade or a percentage - and also make the data available so we can see how the overall assessment came to be.

This information is the best way the public has to hold its schools accountable. But it’s not meaningful if - as we suspect might be the case - the public struggles to interpret that information.

The state should rethink this approach.

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The Jefferson City News-Tribune, Oct. 20

The mysterious case of vaping

Until recently, vaping has been hailed as a safe alternative to smoking, a known killer. Now, vaping is being billed as an epidemic that’s killing our youth. Talk about mixed messages.

Last week, Gov. Mike Parson directed state departments to create a campaign aimed at reducing youth vaping.

“People across the country are being hospitalized with life-threatening symptoms linked to vaping,” the governor said in an Oct. 15 News Tribune story. “The use of vaping devices among high school students increased by nearly 80 percent from 2017 to 2018.”

We have to admit, the whole vaping thing has us a bit confused.

As we reported then, the number of confirmed (or probable) cases of pulmonary disease brought on by use of e-cigarettes in Missouri has risen to 23, but still only one death has been attributed to the condition. Nationwide, 1,299 lung injury cases and 26 deaths have been reported from e-cigarettes.

Let’s put that in perspective: The World Health Organization says tobacco kills up to half of its users - an estimated 8 million people each year. Nearly 500,000 of those people are from the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

While those numbers aren’t true apples to apples comparisons - for one thing, they don’t take into account the percentage of those who vape versus those who use tobacco products - they still show that vaping kills a minute fraction of users compared to tobacco.

Even the relatively small number of vaping deaths are unacceptable. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has launched a criminal investigation of the deaths.

Many of the injuries/deaths associated with vaping have been linked to illicitly modified e-cigarette cartridges. Users modify them to add THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, among other things.

Hopefully the FDA probe will tell us whether the problem is simply people misusing vaping devices or if there’s a health concern with vaping as intended, with flavored liquid and/or nicotine.

Meanwhile, we concur with Parson’s campaign against youth vaping, but we’re not ready to malign the entire industry with “Reefer Madness”-like hysteria.

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