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Monsanto accused by legal opponents of hiring internet trolls

95 points by valeg 8y ago

ex_angry_guy 8y ago
friendly reminder that conspiracy theorists have been very vocal about this for years in the face of mockery. 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 ;)
0x262d 8y ago
this is a problem of capitalism - large companies have the resources and incentive to do evil shit and cover it up. it has happened in various forms for hundreds of years. any talk of online discourse or moderation that ignores this fundamental, overriding incentive and power structure misses the point. private profit and private property need to be abolished to fix it.
- mmirate 8y ago
  Actually, it's a problem of capitalism being distorted by a monopoly on the use of force - aka a government - which can tax, subsidize, protect-from-liability and regulate, different people/firms at its own whims and interests. Without tax advantages, liability limitations, regulatory captures, etc., it would be all-but-unthinkable for any firm to reach Monsanto's size, wipe its competition out, and avoid collapsing under the weight of its own bureaucracy and diseconomies-of-scale. At minimum, if we actually owned the air we breathe and the water we purchase, and if we weren't thusly impeded by EPA incompetenc; then Monsanto would actually have to pay a fair price for its pollution. Instead, that task is confined to the EPA who, being a centralized and irreplacable monopoly, get swiftly paid-off by the very firms they were supposed to be investigating. (Also, taxation itself is theft a priori, but that's mostly another topic.)
jhcl 8y ago
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.
- vahji 8y ago
  >Have reporters query [...] live the life of information again. Journalists are like regular expressions: when you throw more at the problem, it just gets bigger
- meesles 8y ago
  Doesn't sound like a solution that gets a ton of people rich... pass! /s
- koolba 8y ago
  > The problem is that everyone believes what Joe or Jane Doe posts on the internet, no matter who pays them. My default is to assume everything on the internet (and print) is at worst an outright lie and at best a slanted half truth. Am I the minority?
  - randomdata 8y ago
    I have always assumed that everything on the internet is meant to be a joke. Be it accurate or inaccurate, I get to laugh either way.
  - burgerboy 8y ago
    Yes, you are
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- tjr225 8y ago
  It really boggles my mind that a decade ago I would've been told not to believe what I read on wikipedia and now folks don't question anything they read on the internet. Is it because we've been fed this illusion of social networks?
nxc18 8y ago
This is disgusting. A younger version of myself fell for this nonsense - its embarrassing to admit, but I think its worthwhile to point out that there are ordinary people that get caught up in it. This kind of thing really breaks down trust in online communications, which I suppose in hindsight means I should have been less trusting in the first place. I'd like to think real name policies (like Facebook's) would deal with this sort of thing, but clearly it doesn't, and causes a whole host of other problems. What's the solution here?
- alexandercrohde 8y ago
  I like that you're asking the right question. I have a number of ideas, but none are very clean or simple answers.
- Farradfahren 8y ago
  Blockchained to your real name reputation, and if you sink that reputation, those networked to you, as employer go down with you. If you sink your reputation for money, you should be able to redeem yourself by revealing the deal, and shift the bad kharma to the producer of the incident. Basically offer whistelblower incentives and have a nearly medieval reputation system.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
markdown 8y ago
> Trolls "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
droithomme 8y ago
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? In addition to the phenomenon of tons of people you never saw or heard from before suddenly appearing in an obscure forum to attack anyone who questioned Monsanto's claims, we also say high profile and prominent trusted commenters who were shilling as well.
- tptacek 8y ago
  You're not a crank conspiracy theorist when you suggest Monsanto pays people to astroturf forums. It would be surprising if they didn't, since far less freighted companies have done the same thing. 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.
- zwkrt 8y ago
  > How much did they spend on this multi decade long campaign? I would bet they had to pay no more than 10 people full time, lets say at $20/hr. That is an order of magnitude cheaper than advertising.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  I don't understand how they apparently managed to monitor every single forum on FB. I was discussing something entirely tangential in a FB forum about something irrelevant once, Roundup was mentioned, and two posters immediately appeared to aggressively push the corporate line. Does FB make private monitoring APIs available to corporates? If so, that's questionably legal in a number of countries. Or did Monsanto really build/hire a firehose barrel to monitor everything in real time?
interesthrow2 8y ago
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 company engaged in this, but the scale is insane, each time I left a comment regarding the latest Monsanto VS a farmer that got cancer due to Monsanto's product case, at least 30/50 comments were left as an answer. It happened only on Monsanto threads.
- marktangotango 8y ago
  I had an example two weeks ago to a comment r/cscareerquestions. I made a derogatory comment about Monsanto in a thread with 7 comments and a couple of up votes, no way it would garner the number of downvotes my comment received. The only explanation the one presented here.
- randomdata 8y ago
  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 Reddit users doing what Reddit users do. What if the paid trolls were the ones who posted the ridiculous comments so that the 'right fighters' come out of the woodwork in droves to defend the company? Once they get used to defending the company for things that are clearly false, they become skeptical of the real grievances. That's kind of brilliant when you think about it.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    That's an interesting dynamic I hadn't thought of before and is for sure the reason I have any opinion at all about Monsanto (for the sport of spotting the bad countervailing opinions). It's a funny thought, but there's no way Monsanto is paying people to post dumb anti-Monsanto arguments; the anti-Monsanto position is much more popular on message boards.
jbryson3 8y ago
Come on guys, Monsanto isn’t that bad. They single handedly saved my entire family from a burning building.
staz 8y ago
Strange, the original article's title doesn't have the ending question mark
- dang 8y ago
  We add question marks sometime as a way of de-baiting a controversial title.
20938ny9 8y ago
Are there any companies who don't use paid shills these days? As soon as I find out some company is shilling MY Internet, I quit doing business with them. Google and Microsoft are especially egregious, I've heard that every Google employee is expected to post ten times a day to forums and social media promoting their brand.
dragonwriter 8y ago
Source headline is clickbait and HN headline just adds a question mark; an accurate headline reflecting th content of the story is “Monsanto accused by legal opponents of hiring internet trolls." (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.)
- dang 8y ago
  Ok, we've put your suggested title above. If someone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) one, we can change it again.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- alexandercrohde 8y ago
  I think you may be misunderstanding when you call the title "clickbait." They aren't merely accused of this, they also cite an exhibit as evidence in court. However what that evidence is appears to be sealed at this point in time.
lovemenot 8y ago
Which weed-killer's effective against astro-turf?
cmroanirgo 8y ago
It makes me wonder how many other markets and industries are out there using the same techniques to bend the public's heart and minds to continue to be a consumer of 'X'? Are we at a point that we must be distrustful of everything we read and hear, because we can't trust it? I've seen quite a few articles here on HN on how even scientific reporting is not as rock-solid, A-grade 'truth' as we'd like it to be.
- kstenerud 8y ago
  You never could trust it. The only difference now is in the number of actors involved, and their motives for lying to and manipulating you. Other than that, it's the same as it always was.
  - Farradfahren 8y ago
    Well, the journalism abstraction layer was circumvented- you could argue, that attention got cheaper to get without the gatekeeper.
- matis140 8y ago
  I do not think any of this is an internet age issue. Looking back the tobacco industry was able to suppress research about smoking for a couple decades back when journalism was more trusted and supposedly better vetted for grade a truth. They had lots of advertising targeting children, research about safety, propaganda about benefits of smoking and all presented through mainstream media.
code_beers 8y ago
I had suspected this, just from the juvenile tone of the conversation. Those who raised legitimate questions about GMOs were dismissed as "afraid of science" from all sides pretty much immediately. I find largely unregulated scientific experiments carried out on an entire population with literally zero long-term studies to support their safety a bad idea, but many (most?) on the Web appear easily misled by these trolls.
ribble 8y ago
want to see some in action? check out the mods of r/farming.

95 points by valeg 8y ago

friendly reminder that conspiracy theorists have been very vocal about this for years in the face of mockery. 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 ;)

0x262d 8y ago

this is a problem of capitalism - large companies have the resources and incentive to do evil shit and cover it up. it has happened in various forms for hundreds of years. any talk of online discourse or moderation that ignores this fundamental, overriding incentive and power structure misses the point. private profit and private property need to be abolished to fix it.

mmirate 8y ago
Actually, it's a problem of capitalism being distorted by a monopoly on the use of force - aka a government - which can tax, subsidize, protect-from-liability and regulate, different people/firms at its own whims and interests. Without tax advantages, liability limitations, regulatory captures, etc., it would be all-but-unthinkable for any firm to reach Monsanto's size, wipe its competition out, and avoid collapsing under the weight of its own bureaucracy and diseconomies-of-scale. At minimum, if we actually owned the air we breathe and the water we purchase, and if we weren't thusly impeded by EPA incompetenc; then Monsanto would actually have to pay a fair price for its pollution. Instead, that task is confined to the EPA who, being a centralized and irreplacable monopoly, get swiftly paid-off by the very firms they were supposed to be investigating. (Also, taxation itself is theft a priori, but that's mostly another topic.)

jhcl 8y ago

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.

vahji 8y ago
>Have reporters query [...] live the life of information again. Journalists are like regular expressions: when you throw more at the problem, it just gets bigger
meesles 8y ago
Doesn't sound like a solution that gets a ton of people rich... pass! /s
koolba 8y ago
> The problem is that everyone believes what Joe or Jane Doe posts on the internet, no matter who pays them. My default is to assume everything on the internet (and print) is at worst an outright lie and at best a slanted half truth. Am I the minority?
- randomdata 8y ago
  I have always assumed that everything on the internet is meant to be a joke. Be it accurate or inaccurate, I get to laugh either way.
- burgerboy 8y ago
  Yes, you are
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
tjr225 8y ago
It really boggles my mind that a decade ago I would've been told not to believe what I read on wikipedia and now folks don't question anything they read on the internet. Is it because we've been fed this illusion of social networks?

nxc18 8y ago

This is disgusting. A younger version of myself fell for this nonsense - its embarrassing to admit, but I think its worthwhile to point out that there are ordinary people that get caught up in it. This kind of thing really breaks down trust in online communications, which I suppose in hindsight means I should have been less trusting in the first place. I'd like to think real name policies (like Facebook's) would deal with this sort of thing, but clearly it doesn't, and causes a whole host of other problems. What's the solution here?

alexandercrohde 8y ago
I like that you're asking the right question. I have a number of ideas, but none are very clean or simple answers.
Farradfahren 8y ago
Blockchained to your real name reputation, and if you sink that reputation, those networked to you, as employer go down with you. If you sink your reputation for money, you should be able to redeem yourself by revealing the deal, and shift the bad kharma to the producer of the incident. Basically offer whistelblower incentives and have a nearly medieval reputation system.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

markdown 8y ago

> Trolls "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

droithomme 8y ago

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? In addition to the phenomenon of tons of people you never saw or heard from before suddenly appearing in an obscure forum to attack anyone who questioned Monsanto's claims, we also say high profile and prominent trusted commenters who were shilling as well.

tptacek 8y ago
You're not a crank conspiracy theorist when you suggest Monsanto pays people to astroturf forums. It would be surprising if they didn't, since far less freighted companies have done the same thing. 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.
zwkrt 8y ago
> How much did they spend on this multi decade long campaign? I would bet they had to pay no more than 10 people full time, lets say at $20/hr. That is an order of magnitude cheaper than advertising.
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
I don't understand how they apparently managed to monitor every single forum on FB. I was discussing something entirely tangential in a FB forum about something irrelevant once, Roundup was mentioned, and two posters immediately appeared to aggressively push the corporate line. Does FB make private monitoring APIs available to corporates? If so, that's questionably legal in a number of countries. Or did Monsanto really build/hire a firehose barrel to monitor everything in real time?

interesthrow2 8y ago

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 company engaged in this, but the scale is insane, each time I left a comment regarding the latest Monsanto VS a farmer that got cancer due to Monsanto's product case, at least 30/50 comments were left as an answer. It happened only on Monsanto threads.

marktangotango 8y ago
I had an example two weeks ago to a comment r/cscareerquestions. I made a derogatory comment about Monsanto in a thread with 7 comments and a couple of up votes, no way it would garner the number of downvotes my comment received. The only explanation the one presented here.
randomdata 8y ago
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 Reddit users doing what Reddit users do. What if the paid trolls were the ones who posted the ridiculous comments so that the 'right fighters' come out of the woodwork in droves to defend the company? Once they get used to defending the company for things that are clearly false, they become skeptical of the real grievances. That's kind of brilliant when you think about it.
- tptacek 8y ago
  That's an interesting dynamic I hadn't thought of before and is for sure the reason I have any opinion at all about Monsanto (for the sport of spotting the bad countervailing opinions). It's a funny thought, but there's no way Monsanto is paying people to post dumb anti-Monsanto arguments; the anti-Monsanto position is much more popular on message boards.

jbryson3 8y ago

Come on guys, Monsanto isn’t that bad. They single handedly saved my entire family from a burning building.

staz 8y ago

Strange, the original article's title doesn't have the ending question mark

dang 8y ago
We add question marks sometime as a way of de-baiting a controversial title.

20938ny9 8y ago

Are there any companies who don't use paid shills these days? As soon as I find out some company is shilling MY Internet, I quit doing business with them. Google and Microsoft are especially egregious, I've heard that every Google employee is expected to post ten times a day to forums and social media promoting their brand.

dragonwriter 8y ago

Source headline is clickbait and HN headline just adds a question mark; an accurate headline reflecting th content of the story is “Monsanto accused by legal opponents of hiring internet trolls." (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.)

dang 8y ago
Ok, we've put your suggested title above. If someone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) one, we can change it again.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
alexandercrohde 8y ago
I think you may be misunderstanding when you call the title "clickbait." They aren't merely accused of this, they also cite an exhibit as evidence in court. However what that evidence is appears to be sealed at this point in time.

lovemenot 8y ago

Which weed-killer's effective against astro-turf?

cmroanirgo 8y ago

It makes me wonder how many other markets and industries are out there using the same techniques to bend the public's heart and minds to continue to be a consumer of 'X'? Are we at a point that we must be distrustful of everything we read and hear, because we can't trust it? I've seen quite a few articles here on HN on how even scientific reporting is not as rock-solid, A-grade 'truth' as we'd like it to be.

kstenerud 8y ago
You never could trust it. The only difference now is in the number of actors involved, and their motives for lying to and manipulating you. Other than that, it's the same as it always was.
- Farradfahren 8y ago
  Well, the journalism abstraction layer was circumvented- you could argue, that attention got cheaper to get without the gatekeeper.
matis140 8y ago
I do not think any of this is an internet age issue. Looking back the tobacco industry was able to suppress research about smoking for a couple decades back when journalism was more trusted and supposedly better vetted for grade a truth. They had lots of advertising targeting children, research about safety, propaganda about benefits of smoking and all presented through mainstream media.

code_beers 8y ago

I had suspected this, just from the juvenile tone of the conversation. Those who raised legitimate questions about GMOs were dismissed as "afraid of science" from all sides pretty much immediately. I find largely unregulated scientific experiments carried out on an entire population with literally zero long-term studies to support their safety a bad idea, but many (most?) on the Web appear easily misled by these trolls.

ribble 8y ago

want to see some in action? check out the mods of r/farming.