She worked in animal research. Now she’s blocked from commenting on it

For a long time, Madeline Krasno didn’t tell other animal rights advocates that she had worked in a monkey research lab as a college student. It had taken her years to understand her nightmares and fragmented memories as signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. And some activists could be vicious to former lab workers.

But four years after she graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Krasno started posting online about her experiences. Eventually, she started tagging the school in those posts and then commenting on its pages.

Many of those comments disappeared. As she would later learn, it was not a mistake or a glitch. Both the university and the National Institutes for Health were blocking her comments. Now with support from free speech and animal rights organizations, she is suing both institutions.

“They’re suppressing any kind of conversation on the issue,” Krasno said in an interview while walking her dog, Millie. (She said she thinks of Millie as a person - and a soul mate - not a pet.) “You can’t tell me that’s not a free speech violation.”

Two courts have told her that it’s not a violation, that the blocking of keywords such as “animal testing” and related hashtags is a legal way of managing online conversations - the same way a local government can avoid chaotic town halls by deciding who speaks and on what topics. Both rulings are now on appeal and could go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Courts are just starting to dig into the parameters of free speech online,” said lawyer Stephanie Krent of the Knight First Amendment Institute, who argued NIH’s case in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit last week. Courts have said officials - including former president Donald Trump - can’t muzzle criticism online. But they haven’t said what the limits are when the government is allowed to moderate.

The lab in Madison where Krasno worked was named after Harry Harlow, a pioneering psychologist whose work upended harmful beliefs that too much tenderness would soften children’s minds. On the contrary, he found, neglect and isolation were liable to make children grow up angry and violent; mothers who had been traumatized were liable to became neglectful or abusive toward their children.

He came to those conclusions through experiments on rhesus monkeys. Some were separated early from their mothers and given a choice between a doll made of cloth or one made of wire. Some were left for months in a box he called the “pit of despair”; female monkeys were forced to copulate by being tied to a device he called “the rape rack.”

Harlow’s name, along with that of a scientist who worked with him, are on NIH’s list of banned words. So are “animals,” “cruelty,” “monkeys,” “revolting,” “testing” and “torture.” After Krasno’s lawsuit was filed, “PETA,” “#stopanimaltesting,” “#stoptesting” and “#stoptestingonanimals” were taken off the list of banned words.

NIH said it chose those words because they were the ones most commonly used in off-topic, repetitive comments. For example, an Instagram post on sickle-cell anemia prompted more than five dozen comments that were variations on “#animalabuser,” although the research highlighted did not involve animal testing.

Krasno, now 33, worked in the Harlow lab decades after his death and was never directly involved in research. She was a student caretaker for the hours when scientists and their assistants were off-duty. Immediately, she says, she had some awareness that what she was seeing was wrong. On her first day at the lab, she was taken to the one cage that housed multiple macaques. Her supervisor gave her some peanuts and showed her how to hand the treats through the bars.

“They were so excited,” she said. “They’re living in basically dungeons - windowless rooms where the lighting half the time wasn’t working, where the drains weren’t working. A peanut is all they have to live for.”

Other monkeys were caged alone, she said. While mothers were not separated from their babies the way Harlow’s test subjects had been, Krasno said the mothers often rejected their offspring or failed to properly nurse them because they had not learned from older monkeys in the wild. Though they weren’t tied down, she said, female monkeys were clearly traumatized by being put into cages with unfamiliar males for breeding: “You would hear screaming.”

A spokesman for the school said that they have no evidence of mistreatment during Krasno’s time in the lab and that federal agencies provide oversight of animal research. The school settled an investigation with the U.S. Agriculture Department over alleged violations of the Animal Welfare Act in 2020 by paying a $74,000 fine, saying safety measures had been improved.

“Monkeys in the university’s facilities receive regular attention and care from specialized veterinarians” and “are housed socially with other monkeys … as research and safety allow,” said Chris Barncard, the spokesman. “Studying animals is an important way - in many cases, the only way - to answer crucial questions about basic biological processes and to ethically study diseases with often devastating consequences for humans and animals.”

Krasno had planned to go into primate conservation. Instead, after graduation she began working in animal sanctuaries. She would dream about being back in the lab, taking photographs - something she had never done when she worked there. She started going to therapy and was eventually diagnosed with PTSD, she said.

In 2017, Krasno posted on Instagram a photo of a tattoo she had gotten that said: “for patrick” - the name of the first baby monkey she cared for in the lab. And she started intermittently describing her experiences.

At first, it was her ideological allies who responded negatively, saying she was a psychopath for having worked in animal research. “Some of the worst things that have been said to me have come from animal rights activists,” Krasno said. But she noticed that when she tagged her alma mater in posts, the school removed the notation. Feeling she had hit a nerve, she started commenting on the school’s Facebook and Instagram pages. The comments disappeared. So did her comments on NIH’s pages.

A friend in she met through a vegan University of Wisconsin alumni Facebook group tried posting similar comments; they also disappeared. They filed Freedom of Information Act requests and learned that certain words were being automatically blocked. When those filters didn’t work, the university was manually removing Krasno’s comments.

With help from a friend at the Animal Legal Defense Fund, she sued the school and NIH; People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), joined the NIH suit. In response, both institutions said that they were simply trying to keep their social media feeds from being overwhelmed by repetitive, irrelevant comments and that Krasno and other animal rights activists just happened to be the ones leaving them.

It’s “a seemingly coordinated campaign to flood [NIH’s] social media pages with off-topic commentary related to animal testing,” Justice Department attorney Jennifer Utrecht said during last week’s oral argument at the D.C. Circuit. “The people who are repeatedly violating the off-topic policy all have a particular viewpoint.” She said followers of an online chat on brain health and a social media campaign on retina issues were confused and annoyed by the repeated posts on animal rights.

Other posts blocked by NIH included external links, profanity, strings of numbers, the mention of cannabis and “#believemothers,” used by anti-vaccine activists.

But Krasno’s side argues that animal testing is so common that almost any scientific research can be linked to it, and any comment on it is arguably relevant. For example, as the animal advocates pointed out in their court filings, the sickle cell researcher has done work on rats.

“Most people would agree that a comment that the coronavirus vaccine was tested on animals would be on-topic,” attorney Caitlin Foley of the Animal Legal Defense Fund said. “But if that’s filtered out, they wouldn’t know speech was being censored.”

Appellate judges seemed to be divided over how to handle the comments.

If banning certain keywords violates the First Amendment, then content moderation would be “extremely difficult,” Judge Brad Garcia said. Judge Patricia Millett said having humans, rather than a computer program, read and curate threads was “unrealistic.” But Millett was also skeptical that the government had proved the bans are necessary. “I would not consider dozens, on internet threads, which can go on forever, flooding,” she said, adding, “I really am struggling with how ‘test’ is just clearly off-topic for NIH.”

Krasno said that if the lawsuits succeed, she plans to sue other universities that have engaged in similar deletion of animal rights advocacy.

“These are our tax dollars,” she said. “To say you can’t even talk about it in ways that most people are discussing issues - that’s just not fair.”