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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 con
by 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 agoYou'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 agoI 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?