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They also pay shills to spread propaganda in the comments sections anywhere Monsanto is discussed. It’s particularly obvious since it’s the same users, with the
by diogenescynic 9y ago
They also pay shills to spread propaganda in the comments sections anywhere Monsanto is discussed. It’s particularly obvious since it’s the same users, with the same talking points, commenting within minutes. The same 5-10 pro-Monsanto accounts on Reddit show up in most discussions. I suspect this is going on for many other aspects of our life and it’s downright paranoia inducing.
- Dlotan 9y agoI think this is really tricky. On the one hand I like other viewpoints to discuss such a difficult topic. On the other hand I don't want to get corporate shills. Also the filter bubble point, which brings you to only wanting to hear your own opinion. The way hackernews handles this most of the time is way better by letting people make a disclaimer.
- alexandercrohde 9y agoHow is it tricky? If a company wants to defend itself, it shouldn't do so via paid individuals masquerading as private parties ("Let Nothing Go"), the only purpose of that is to misrepresent public opinion and appeal to bandwagon bias.
- 09bjb 9y ago"Should" (in any moral sense) and "Monsanto" don't play nicely together.
- NotSammyHagar 9y agoOpen discussion is welcome. But I cannot ever remember when paid shills are helpful, in my experience.
- Dlotan 9y agoI like it in cases I just misunderstood something and they point out, why I'm wrong. Ofc with a disclaimer but even without they usually have good knowledge of the topic so they should also be heard.
- NotSammyHagar 9y agoWhere is this place where there are paid shills who identify themselves who make helpful comments? I'm surprised it exists.
- Dlotan 9y agoHackernews, whenever there is someone with Disclaimer: I work for xy
- Wintamute 9y agoChecks diogenescynic's comment history for evidence of anti corporate shill shilling
- diogenescynic 9y agoGoogle astroturfing... it’s a huge industry. Not a made up conspiracy theory. It’s as benign as a filing thousands of individual orders with different book stores to get a new author listed on the NYTimes best seller list and as malicious as making up fake personalities to promote obvious lies. Public relations, public affairs, and marketing companies are heavily involved.
- wu-ikkyu 9y agoHere is an interesting study from a couple years back about astroturfing reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/38wl43/we_used_sock_puppets_in_rnetsec_last_year_and_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/38wl43/we_used_sock...
- Wintamute 9y agoI'm not disagreeing with you dude, just running with your "downright paranoia inducing" comment ... never mind ...
- 09bjb 9y agoYeah this one has been tricky. I haven't bothered to spend a ton of time on it, but I've done a deep dive or two on a user's history when it seems suspicious...and often had my suspicions amplified. Lots of pro- industry stuff and not a lot of discussion on other topics. Sometimes it's just people who work in the industry and have a huge portion of their identity influencing their view...which given that they have some expertise and lingo complicates things. But sometimes it's just a laughably one-dimensional HN account.
- searine 9y agoOr maybe, juuuust maybe, people have different opinions about things. Imagine that.
- realusername 9y agoIt looks too systematic for it to be real accounts, their comments are only on monsanto subjects or other pro-corporate PR, real users also show interests in other things.
- searine 9y agoThat's exactly the kind of empty talking point BIG ORGANIC wants you to spew. All carefully calculated to get you to buy their overpriced luxury product! Look, people disagree about things. Get over it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deadmetheny 9y agoDon't kid yourself. People can and do disagree, but they doesn't preclude the fact that astroturfing absolutely does happen as well, and it's absolutely a problem.
- searine 9y ago>but they doesn't preclude the fact that astroturfing absolutely does happen as well, and it's absolutely a problem. Occam's razor. What is more likely : A. This normal person on the internet disagrees with me. B. There is a multinational conspiracy to control the narrative on topic X and in reality everyone universally agrees with me that topic X is a bad thing.
- deadmetheny 9y agoYou are hopeless.
- lsmarigo 9y agoI suspect (hope) you're being downvoted for being off-topic because what you describe is a serious problem. There are multiple PR/Media orgs that specialize in this now and they're far more advanced than using the same accounts.
- Pica_soO 9y agoThere should be NN trained on eathing accounts posting stories with near-similar content who have been proven wrong.
- ConceptJunkie 9y agoI'm sure you are much joking ha ha! Monsanto does not need properganda as it is a wanderful company who's products make everyones life better. Monsanto feeds the world, don't you know?
- dang 9y agoPlease don't invoke the astroturfing/shillage meme here unless you have something specific (i.e. more substantive than someone happening to hold a divergent view) to point to. It isn't that what you said is wrong, it's that this topic leads to bottom-of-the-barrel discussion quality, like the below. It's always the same and it's tedious. That's why we added a bit about it to the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Real astroturfing and shilling exist, but internet users also frequently imagine it. There's no way out of this hall of mirrors—discussions just die there—so we all need to have the discipline to avoid it by default. If anyone thinks they're seeing real astroturfing on HN they should email us so we can investigate.