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(And not “to counter bad publicity” but “in bizarre scheme to manipulate decisions in ongoing legal cases via PR”; that is, the accusers specifically state that this is a tort defense strategy.)
Send those responsible to court or slap a fine on it but that's not the problem. The problem is that everyone believes what Joe or Jane Doe posts on the internet, no matter who pays them. Have reporters query (non corporate) scientists skilled in the subject, let the mad blabbermouth era be over and live the life of information again.
Journalists are like regular expressions: when you throw more at the problem, it just gets bigger
It does not surprise me. They've been extremely active on reddit and HN for years. You cannot say anything bad about Monsanto without at least a dozen of people coming at you with bullshit studies defending Monsanto products/ techs. This is a confirmation that indeed, Monsanto paid shills to systematically answer comments on internet forums to counter any criticism of that company. This is obviously not the only comp…
This is what people have tended to say any time I defended Monsanto here --- not because I particularly like Monsanto, but because people seem to make a bunch of stuff up about them, and as a card-carrying nerd, I have a problem watching people be proudly wrong on HN. It should probably be obvious that I've never taken a dime from Monsanto (though: people in Mountain View used to think our office was a Monsanto offic…
Precisely my position, "frankenfood" just grinds my gears.
It does not surprise me. They've been extremely active on reddit and HN for years. You cannot say anything bad about Monsanto without at least a dozen of people coming at you with bullshit studies defending Monsanto products/ techs. This is a confirmation that indeed, Monsanto paid shills to systematically answer comments on internet forums to counter any criticism of that company. This is obviously not the only comp…
corporations are working their hardest to control social narrative. the internet has made this tactic frighteningly effective. I suspect we would all be deeply bothered if we learned the true extent of it.
edit: my shill senses are tingling ;)
It does not surprise me. They've been extremely active on reddit and HN for years. You cannot say anything bad about Monsanto without at least a dozen of people coming at you with bullshit studies defending Monsanto products/ techs. This is a confirmation that indeed, Monsanto paid shills to systematically answer comments on internet forums to counter any criticism of that company. This is obviously not the only comp…
On the flip side, Monsanto gets some incredibly ridiculous comments directed towards it. Things that even those who have the most hatred for Monsanto would realize doesn't add up. People on Reddit in particular love to point out when someone is wrong. For free. Discussions about Monsanto are low hanging fruit and easily searched out. The fact that you received 30-50 comments suggests to me that most were just regular…
They've been everywhere for years and discussion about "Monsanto shills" and their "50 cent army" has been ongoing, always resulting in being called a crank conspiracy theorist by other shill accounts - as well as the terminally naïve. Interesting that the actual policy was to leave no comment uncontested, no matter the size of the forum, anywhere on the net. How much did they spend on this multi decade long campaign…
You risk becoming a crank conspiracy theorist, however, if you start to lapse into the position that anyone defending Monsanto must either be themselves a shill or the catspaw of some shill.
It does not surprise me. They've been extremely active on reddit and HN for years. You cannot say anything bad about Monsanto without at least a dozen of people coming at you with bullshit studies defending Monsanto products/ techs. This is a confirmation that indeed, Monsanto paid shills to systematically answer comments on internet forums to counter any criticism of that company. This is obviously not the only comp…
If you have specific evidence of abuse on HN, please tell us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. If you don't, the site guidelines ask you not to make such insinuations: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Overwhelmingly, people decide they're seeing astroturfing as a reflex response to any view they sufficiently dislike. That is an internet sauce that we all need to get off of.
More explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... The point isn't that astroturfing doesn't exist, it's that on HN, users need to comment about it factually and not simply do fantasy projection. The latter is the most common case and therefore the null hypothesis when this comes up.