[thegrim33]

People have to learn to recognize the patterns.

In this case, lighthouse reports is an international NGO which receives on the order of ~1MM in income per year (an extremely common pattern for these NGOs), which was directly given to them by (unspecified) government grants and (unnamed) private donors (can see all this in their openly published annual reports). In exchange for the funding (80.38% of which they paid out to themselves as wages/compensation), they put together and release "reports", "studies", etc., that push the messaging the NGO was created to push.

[shermantanktop]

I think you are saying "an NGO probably has an agenda." Ok, sure, they are not robots with no opinions, and if you read even the first few sentences of that report you can see the opinion.

But if you are suggesting that this NGO is carrying water for some unspecified shadowy group that is pulling the strings, you'll need to provide some backing for that. Who has a nefarious motivation to oppose junk food?

Trial lawyers? Misguided do-gooders? Big Celery?

[Cpoll]

> motivation to oppose junk food.

On social media, making dubious claims about food science or food ingredients, then following up by selling some "clean, unprocessed, organic" product is big business. (I make no claims about this specific NGO).

[munk-a]

Yes - the obvious state of dysfunction in food regulation and lack of enforcement in that area has led to an abundance of scam supplement hawkers[1] but I don't think the right conclusion to draw from that is that all criticisms of food regulation are in bad faith - I think it's very fair to say "We should have a serious discussion about our food quality and also we need to crack down on these BS supplements". I think we're all[2] pretty well aligned on the fact that the BS supplements need the crack down but we also should introspect on why so many people are motivated to seek things like that out.

1. I personally enjoy a can of hogwater every day and am happy to give you a referral code.

2. Except those who financially benefit from hawking snake oil, of course.

[dylan604]

astroturfing works, and is only getting better/worse depending on your point of view. it used to require people to read forums and make posts manually. now, you can automate that with a bot and in multiple languages.

[DrewADesign]

It’s only bad if you value the pittance of social trust people occasionally still afford each other. That’s definitely not as cool as another vacation home and a shiny new gofast boat for some of the few thousand people in this country that actually benefit from this sort of large-scale manipulation.

[verisimi]

> astroturfing works, and is only getting better/worse

Perhaps one would say 'increasing' or 'decreasing'?

[mmooss]

What are you calling astroturfing? If anything, it would be the comment upthread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127343

[dylan604]

"On social media, making dubious claims about food science or food ingredients, then following up by selling some "

[shimman]

So you're upset about something that hasn't happened yet?

[overtone1000]

Up vote for Big Celery.

[verisimi]

If you think any human endeavour, especially those that relate to handling of money, is without an agenda, I think you'd be wrong. If you also throw in the fact that this money is not taxed, you increase nefarious incentives. And that money can be given without needing to show the names publicly, this doesn't increase comfort.

Finally, even if robots were to run these operations, someone would have to code them and own them, right?

[Forgeties79]

Unfortunately in the current political climate “NGO” is just a hop and a step away from saying “the deep state” for some people. They vaguely gesture to it and talk about it as if it’s a bogeyman.

Not saying they are specifically doing that, but I can’t confidently say they aren’t either

[throwawayffffas]

It's not they are not robots with no opinions. The agenda is the reason the organisation exists. NGOs exist to push agendas. If you are on the other side of an agenda it's always "outrageous" the government is funding them of course.

I do not know who is pushing but if you think there is not an entire industry of "healthy" alternatives for the companies in the article, you are very much mistaken.

Hell it might be the artificial sweetener industry, in the UK it's now practically impossible to buy a soda that is not full of artificial sweeteners, excluding regular coca cola, and regular red bull.

[mcmcmc]

Not all NGOs. Some are actually mission focused and spend their money and effort on direct action instead of policy or advocacy. Do you really think the purpose of Doctors Without Borders is to push an agenda? No. They provide care to those who would otherwise receive none, who would suffer and die from poverty as much as illness.

[AlotOfReading]

Unfortunately, there are actually people who believe that DWB's purpose is political. Here's an example from the Times of Israel [0].

[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/doctors-without-borders-and-th...

[Pay08]

The article doesn't back up your comment.

[AlotOfReading]

I'm not sure how you can read the article and think it isn't arguing MSF/DWB is political. A few quotes:

    Hamas operatives in Gaza hospitals, failure to screen out terrorists, and politicized leadership erode the Nobel Prize-winning aid group’s claim to neutrality

    While continuing to invoke the language of medical neutrality, its rhetoric has become overtly politicized, most notably in its discourse on Israel.

    From medical neutrality to political advocacy

    This ideological position has also been reinforced at the highest level of MSF’s international leadership.

    That silence leaves the international community to ask whether MSF is advocating for Palestinians or functioning as a humanitarian façade through which terror is laundered by the moral authority of humanitarian medicine.

[tbugrara]

Considering we have 0 visibility into how their decisions are made and by whom, I think it's naive to claim that an organization's publicly stated "mission" is the only incentive that organization acts on. I don't know anything about DWB, but what determines if an organization has an agenda is the leadership, not their marketing.

[mcmcmc]

This is just inaccurate. There is absolutely transparency and accountability. They generally have public tax filings and a lot of effort goes into to vetting non-profit finances and spending. Leadership are bound by non-profit tax filing requirements and their charters. They set strategy and execution, as do executives at every organization. But they don’t have free rein to do whatever they feel like.

See here for transparency, Charity Navigator is a great resource: https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/133433452#beacon-report

[autoexec]

It's weird that you're skeptical about this website's motivations while seemingly less interested in the motivations behind companies spending a ton of time and money going to court to keep people from being able to know what ingredients are in their food. The efforts spent against labeling/ingredient transparency seems unjustifiable

[N_Lens]

Sir this is HN where you will find paranoid rich people more aligned with Musk & for defunding USAID

[gruez]

I don't get it, whats up with all the scare quotes when what you're describing is basically what a think tank or advocacy group does?

[arjie]

People have loved this kind of content-slop for a while now. It’s a genre of entertainment writing that has replaced celebrity gossip but is no more meaningful. I suspect it’s because there are demographics where the word ‘study’ or ‘paper’ has some cachet.

It’s true that think-tanks and advocacy groups have used the fact that a certain style of writing signals legitimacy for their own ends for quite some time now. Perhaps the realization here should be that Marlboro-paid scientists also did so and that these kinds of science cuckoo articles are common even in science.

[ElProlactin]

> People have to learn to recognize the patterns.

Indeed, including the pattern of your ridiculous comment.

> In this case, lighthouse reports is an international NGO which receives on the order of ~1MM in income per year (an extremely common pattern for these NGOs), which was directly given to them by (unspecified) government grants and (unnamed) private donors (can see all this in their openly published annual reports). In exchange for the funding (80.38% of which they paid out to themselves as wages/compensation), they put together and release "reports", "studies", etc., that push the messaging the NGO was created to push.

The 2025 report is here:

https://www.lighthousereports.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06...

Grant income was €2,499,181.

Compensation for the core team was €1,342,778. There are ~32 people listed as core team, so that works out to about €42,000/person. Salaries & wages (ostensibly for the management) was €291,661. It looks like 3 people and if that's correct, it works out to ~€97,000/person.

An additional €208,726 was paid to freelancers on projects, and it looks like they had over 10 different "projects" during the year.

Anyone with an iota of common sense can see: nobody is getting rich from this. The vast majority of people doing this type of work don't do it unless they have a non-monetary motivation/interest.

> ...they put together and release "reports", "studies", etc., that push the messaging the NGO was created to push.

Yes, "studies" like https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/syrias-stole..., which revealed that a major European NGO running children's orphanages was apparently knowingly taking in children who had been kidnapped by Bashar al-Assad in an effort to coerce their parents to cooperate with his regime.

But I'm sure you think there's a nefarious intent behind this type of reporting?

[aliasxneo]

I feel like it ends up being heavily emotion/perception driven. NGOS are "good" and "scientific reports" always tell you the truth. Combine the two and you have a recipe for serving information with reduced backlash. Compare that to "big bad corporations" and its not even a fair battle. People figured this out a long time ago and have been using it for awhile now. I feel like now more than ever a healthy dose of pessimism goes a long way towards understanding reality.

Note: I am not suggesting these labels are universally true. I'm simply commenting on what I think is the most common perception of these two groups.

[dfxm12]

1MM in any currency doesn't sound like a lot, especially relative to who they're up against...

[mikem170]

Sounds like enough to pay some people for some months or a year or two - a combination of experts, part-time specialists, cotractors, etc. - to do things like gather some data via their contacts, hack together a meta-study, put out a glossy report andsome press releases, etc.

[munk-a]

I think the bigger point is that there's an overwhelming amount of money going to push the opposite narrative. A quick search revealed that Tyson alone spends well over a million annually on lobbying and I am sure the industry at large spends significantly more on this issue alone.

[mikem170]

Ah, I was more focused on the effectiveness as opposed to the quantity, i.e. if you have a million dollars, that could be decent way to spend it, given the world we live in.

I see what you are saying - that it's not enough compared to what the other side spends.

Money seems to decide too many of these things...

[mmooss]

Just look at their About page, which conflicts with much of the parent comment:

> international NGO

What does 'international' mean here and why do you mention it? About page: "nonprofit organisation registered in the Netherlands with ANBI (Public Benefit Organisation) status"

> ~1MM in income per year

They have a staff of over 30. They must spend much more than $1 million/year.

> In exchange for the funding (80.38% of which they paid out to themselves as wages/compensation)

They list their top salaries on the About page, which ain't much: "The salaries of our five highest paid employees range from €69,000 to €108,000 per year." Fifth highest paid employee makes €69,000.

> directly given to them by (unspecified) government grants and (unnamed) private donors

The About page lists funders by name, as well as "Media partners".

> In exchange for the funding ... they put together and release "reports", "studies", etc., that push the messaging the NGO was created to push.

Could you provide a source for that? Here's what the About page says:

"Editorial Independence is essential to all aspects of the work we do. We work with donors who do not impose conditions that restrict our journalism."

And from another page:

"We offer a collaborative space where hyper-local outlets and freelance journalists can work alongside staff from globally-recognised media. We exist to foster experiments with new formats and we pay particular attention to fresh ways of framing complex issues that will capture public attention and challenge misconceptions."

https://www.lighthousereports.com/what-we-stand-for/

EDIT: How can people on HN care that much about the source, Lighthouse? Right now three users, not including the parent commenter, are motivated enough to promote the disinformation about Lighthouse that they downvoted a mostly factual, informative comment. (I don't care about the votes; they are just evidence.) Maybe there is something I don't know about Lighthouse?

[randysalami]

In Europe though that can be a lot, or South America. And NGO people I know are mostly idealistic college kids who want to do good. Lots of creepy guys too

[mmooss]

69,000 EUR is a lot in the Netherlands? It's a very rich country. It's hardly extravagant.

> And NGO people I know are mostly idealistic college kids who want to do good. Lots of creepy guys too

This is just gossip about anecdotes.

[samueljohnson77]

yes learning pattern is the best