Visual Framing of CRISP Technology and its Regulation in EU, USA and Latin America

The development of gene editing technologies is highly contested. CRISPR (standing for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a gene editing technology that is promising for plant breeding as it may increase crops’ resilience to climate change, deliver higher nutritional value or better resistance to diseases. However, CRISPR is also associated with Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) and is highly controversial due to the environmental and health risks associated with GMO’s. The technology has been recently part of discussions on how to regulated it in the EU, the USA and the Mercosur trade bloc of South American Countries including Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. In 2018 the US and the Mercosur classified CRISPR as a new technology different from GMO, and regulation was put in place in Mercosur, but it was not regulated in the USA. In the EU, the European Court settled a case between a coalition of plaintiffs against the French government; ruling that CRISPR was considered GMO and thus, due to follow the regulations for GMOs in the EU. In this paper, we conduct a visual and textual framing analysis by application of digital methods and interpretive research of URL’s of involved stakeholders in the three internet regions to find out how their visual and textual framing of CRISPR as a GMO – or not - influenced the dynamics of the public controversy, leading to these two different types of understanding of the technology. The question answered is: What are the differences and similarities in the visualizations in context, in the online public debate about how to classify and regulate CRISPR between the US, the EU and Mercosur in 2019?