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>I was branded as a 'privacy nut' Companies do actually employ shills to go on forums and try to sway public opinion. They call them something like public advo

>I was branded as a 'privacy nut' Companies do actually employ shills to go on forums and try to sway public opinion. They call them something like public advocates, doesn't change the idea though.

kaolti 7y ago
I get the feeling this is much more prevalent than any of us realize. Would explain why most comments seem ridiculous.
- tboyd47 7y ago
  You mean how there are somehow always commenters in every topic ready to leap to the defense of China and major US tech companies?
  - dpkonofa 7y ago
    Meh. I would probably be considered (and have been called) a shill for Apple because I tend to defend them way more than most and it's very popular in tech communities to host anti-Apple circlejerks. I have yet to be paid by them for any of my pro-Apple posts.
  - derefr 7y ago
    I would guess that those are, more often than not, not paid shills but rather just people who like taking devil’s-advocate sides in arguments “for fun”, i.e. just for the challenge of seeing if they can construct a valid rebuttal to a comment. (I say this because I believe I’ve done this myself more than once, and I know my personality-type isn’t uncommon on HN.)
    - mannykannot 7y ago
      A simpler explanation is that they are individuals defending against what they perceive as a personal attack via 'tribal' affiliations.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        How about people who simply are commenting against what they consider to be bullshit? I've commented here defending China on some issue a few times in the past. I have no ties with the country (except being on a business trip in Shenzhen for two months), nobody paid or even offered to pay me to do it. It's just I hate bullshit, especially when it becomes popular opinion. Just because China has serious issues doesn't mean it's the Devil and everything it does is evil. It's a country, not unlike Russia or the US. (Particular things I've been addressing in the past are a) treating a billion+ population as if it was a small country, and b) blaming China for all cheap mass produced crap and its environmental impact, conveniently forgetting that they aren't doing it for fun, but to fulfill orders from Western companies.)
        mannykannot 7y ago
        Yeah - I can recognize a little bit of me in that (the bugged by bad arguments part). The answer is probably e) all of the above.
        riversflow 7y ago
        Really confused about b) as I see it, a nation must be its own steward and we must all be stewards of the world. My understanding is that China is environmentally devastated. If that’s true it is completely the fault of the Chinese, not the fault of those that asked of them to do it. Other countries have stricter rules, so companies choose not to do business there. Especially in developing countries that limits growth, but the local environment benefits. Also the factory orders were coming from multinational corporations, they have no real allegiance with the West, they disrupt Western political, taxation and legal systems just like anywhere else. Moreover, consumers don’t realize the damage they are causing if you let a corporation completely externalized the associated costs,(this is not a uniquely Chinese problem) and markets won’t pick the correct winner in those conditions either, who cares if $CHEAPPLASTICGOOD will last a tenth as long if it’s essentially free? China has not only enabled western consumerism, it disrupted the natural economic forces that would prevent such a thing from arising in the first place. To the detriment of the both parties and the world, all because they didn’t respect their environment and thirsted for power. Please explain how this rational is wrong.
    - captainbland 7y ago
      I feel like on a place like this site where there are occasionally job postings and networking opportunities, there's an element of "my comments are my CV/resume" which biases some people towards defending/advocating for companies just in case it affects their career prospects.
    - ajna91 7y ago
      Agreed, I see this often. To be honest if the devil is far more powerful in a given situation, I find it distasteful to fight for him against the hurt party.
    - Zarath 7y ago
      At least in the case of corporate defense, most of them are the "free market solves everything" types who believe that if completely left alone, business will turn the world into some utopia.
  - panarky 7y ago
    Yes, definitely. And there are also paid propagandists who attack Google at every opportunity, while ignoring far worse behavior by Google's competitors. I'd really like to know what percentage of online content is authentic, and what percentage is paid astroturf to shape public opinion by business interests and ideological/political campaigns.
    - close04 7y ago
      > while ignoring far worse behavior by Google's competitors. That’s because whataboutism ia rarely an excuse, if ever. At best it could offer some context. But given the sheer scale of Google’s operations there's not much context to add. They have both the power to do everything on a massive scale: both the violations and the subsequent “opinion shaping”. The only reason mentioning a competitor would be relevant in many Google related topics is as a distraction. I don’t have to care about the competitors to be 100% correct when attacking Google. On the other hand I got downvoted into oblivion even when comparing Google to competitors with undisputed data. My subjective experience is that the pro-Google camp is doing more overtime on the interwebs. And it makes sense that they would be more organized since they are working under one umbrella with more or less one voice. I find it hard to believe that all anti-Google parties would manage to reach anything close to the same level of organization and alignment of goals.
      - panarky 7y ago
        > the pro-Google camp is doing more overtime on the interwebs By "pro-Google camp" do you mean paid shills trolling and astroturfing to promote Google? If so, I'd love a cite or three, because I haven't heard of pro-Google astroturfing campaigns. Doesn't mean they don't exist, but I have heard of very real anti-Google campaigns sponsored by business competitors and ideological warriors.
        close04 7y ago
        I clearly said it’s my subjective experience. On top of that I just heard things the same way you did. Also some common sense. Is your implication that ideological warriors can only exist on one side, against Google? Or that Google would resort to plenty of things that are borderline immoral or illegal but they draw the line at playing the PR card to make it look better? How about some of the thousands of employees that support the company line? You have switched between “whatabout the other guys” and “Google never does this but all their ideological warrior opponents do”. The wording alone is already suspiciously aggressive, not to mention the naive implication that a company like Google would not resort to something all of its opponents are (apparently) doing. Perhaps Google’s real strength is getting people to blindly support their crap. You see, it doesn’t actually have to be a “campaign” if all they did was train people to distract and constantly point the finger at others, pretend everybody else is bad but Google can’t be, and try to censor (via downvotes, reports, etc.) any internet opinion that doesn’t conform. Might sound weird but it’s more or less a literal summary of what you did in the previous 2 comments.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    I'm fairly confident China (and for that matter Russia, but we all knew that) do this. As for tech companies, I would honestly mark a lot of that down to fanboyism. Not that I'd be entirely surprised, but I somewhat doubt that Elon Musk, in particular, is actually paying all of those people. And Tesla seems to have the most defensive supporters on the internet. People talk about Facebook and Google for their privacy practices, Apple for their crappy laptop keyboards, but it's a tiny minority that goes after Tesla when they're the company least capable of hiring people to argue on the internet. (I would also assume that it's a little bit overrated how often this happens, for the sole reason that I spend a lot of time arguing on the internet and never once have I received an offer to go pro!)
    - fmajid 7y ago
      China or Russia don't need to pay shills in all case, there are always nationalists to do it for free. In other cases, it's Stockholm Syndrome. As for paid shills, there is an entire sub-industry of PR called "Reputation management" devoted to this.
      - paganel 7y ago
        I used to read a Financial Times article from either 2011 or 2012 (can’t remember exactly) where some Israeli military person was confirming that Israel was using what we now call shill accounts (he used a different, more pleasantly sounding term). If Israel does it I’m pretty sure Russia and China do it, too. (I don’t have a direct link to said FT article, just a photo I took of said military person’s quote which is somewhere on one of my computers)
      - philwelch 7y ago
        > As for paid shills, there is an entire sub-industry of PR called "Reputation management" devoted to this. Sure. But there are also fanboys everywhere. Between presumption of good faith, Occam's Razor, Hanlon's Razor, and the breadth and depth of fanboyism I've seen online, my default presumption is always "fanboy" over "shill". Similar to your point about nationalists.
    - aphextim 7y ago
  - kaolti 7y ago
    You know it.
- aserafini 7y ago
  It doesn’t even require a ‘paid agent’ theory to explain. Large companies actively court allegiance from their employees and spend serious effort to retain it by, for example, relentlessly offering mandatory courses in the company’s Cultural Values and evaluating promotions through that lens. So it’s not surprising that some BigTech employees are going to actively defend their employer’s values on forums. The best way to understand modern tech company culture is to consider them all very successful cults.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    I don't know if Google is different in this regard, but every tech company I've worked at has forbidden me from "actively defending my employer's values on forums". Maybe not in so many words, but at the very least there's a prohibition against commenting on the company's business on the internet. PR depends a lot on message discipline, which is not what you get from random employees jumping into these arguments.
  - mfg76 7y ago
    Ive even created an account to answer this. It's true that most of these companies have cultural values trainings and a bunch of policies, but it's naive to assume that the hired top 1% will follow these policies or even take them seriously. They are smart enough to not get caught (as if anybody cares to catch them), but that's about it. The today's employment model is a no strings attached contract: the employment can be terminated for no reason at any moment without a notice. This is a double edged sword: not only it gives the company flexibility to fire anyone they don't like, it makes employees mostly indifferent about the company as long as it cuts the paycheck. A typical software engineer does a 4 year gig and when the stock vesting plan ends, he moves on to another gig. There is no reason to take seriously policies of a company he worked at 10 years ago. And regarding evaluating promotions thru the cultural values lens. Yawn. There's no money in promotions. For a cult to be successfull, its members need to be bound by something more serious than a company values training they watch once a year.
- navigatesol 7y ago
  >Would explain why most comments seem ridiculous. Or maybe people have widely differing views on all kinds of subjects? I've been called all kinds of things, which I definitely am not, so I'm inclined to think that people put far to much weight on the conspiracies.
kspacewalk2 7y ago
Should their point of view just not be heard then, in such discussions?
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Is it really a point of view, or is it a carefully engineered sequence of words designed to program people with certain opinions? There are lots of ways to "program" people that bypass their rational mind, and creating a false sense of social consensus is one of them.
  - danieldk 7y ago
    Also, I noticed that some submissions unfavorable to Google seem to be flagged heavily (at least, they were posted more recently and had more upvotes, than higher-ranking submissions). Of course, posting and flagging may not be intentional policy of Google, but also the work of individual Google employees.
    - kerng 7y ago
      I totally can confirm this! It's gotten a little better over the years but still being critical of Google gets you downvoted and flagged quickly. Also worth highlighting that many HN members work for Google, so they have less incentive to shine light on these issues, sometimes maybe even defend Google.
- hobofan 7y ago
  Not if it's disguised as a private individual (which is the default assumption in discussion forums such as this one). If a company wants to present its views, they can do so via press releases or clearly mark their posts as such (or via verified accounts like on Twitter).
  - kart23 7y ago
    Honest question: under which law? Does anything actually prohibit companies from employing people from going on forums and shilling? I think it's perfectly fine for the third party platform to have a policy forbidding this, but the government enforcing something like this would not be ok.
narcoleptic 7y ago
I used to wonder if this was the case. Would you have any idea how their performance is measured by their employers?
paulcole 7y ago
What's more likely: that Google's willing to risk being outed for employing shills or that there are people who actually hold the opposing viewpoint? Personally I tend to think of most people on HN as privacy nuts. Honestly of all the problems in the world to get worked up over, online advertising is pretty low on my list. There's nothing I can do about Google/FB/whatever, so why even think about it. If Google or whoever wants to pay me to keep posting, I'm listening.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  >that Google's willing to risk being outed for employing shills This risk might be lower than you think, the key phrase is, "we didn't realize that the marketing firm we contracted was subcontracting to other, shadier marketing firms, who themselves aren't evil, but fell in with the wrong crowd and ended up trusting a yet deeper level of marketing firm, who was in fact evil."
- Beldin 7y ago
  > There's nothing I can do about Google/FB/whatever, so why even think about it. Actually, of all the stuff going on in the world, this is the one thing where you have an actual degree of control that matters. Sure, one individual won't change business policies. But: you can easily take steps to prevent or reduce the amount of data these companies have on you. Don't use their services, use an ad blocker, use tracking preventing, etc. You can even easily tailor it to your specific needs. Compared to stuff like Brexit, fires in the Amazon, Hong Kong, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, attacks on democracy in Turkey, Hungary etc., it is trivial to do something against Google/FB that has at least the effect of protecting you.
- daxorid 7y ago
  online advertising is pretty low on my list The threat that Google's tracking infrastructure represents is not limited to ads. If they stayed in their proverbial lane and used their panopticon exclusively to sell me things, many of us wouldn't mind as much as we do. But they lend the power and reach of their machine to governments, whether it's China looking to smoke out dissidents, or the NSA PRISM program, or even the DEA itching to score another weed possession arrest, Google gladly and happily does whatever governments ask of them, frequently with no warrant required.
Aunche 7y ago
I'm no marketing expert, but I doubt that the best way Google can think of to sway public opinion is to call people privacy nuts. Google employs over 100,000 people and even more people work at similar companies like Facebook or buy targeted ads. Many of these people browse Hackernews and get offended if others accuse their livelihoods of being evil.
- paul7986 7y ago
  I can attest to that as when you point of things like Google gets caught stealing IP from a MIT student they invited for an interview (a popular thread here on HN) it gets downvoted voraciously. Either its employees, hired guns and or something...
  - philwelch 7y ago
    Or maybe that particular story didn't really stand on its merits. I never saw the thread, but from my perspective (which is increasingly skeptical of Google), any sort of "stealing IP from interview candidates" theory doesn't make much sense.
    - paul7986 7y ago
      It did receive almost 2k upvotes on HN. Further She has emails from Google ATAP(one of their supposed R&D departments) in which they note they invalidated her patent after getting caught... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
  - belltaco 7y ago
    I have noticed this pattern over several years. A few of the times it trips the flamebait detector and gets buried. Negative stories about other big tech companies don't seem to have the same issue with staying up.
  - tzs 7y ago
    I saw that happen to you when you pointed that out in the big Anthony Levandowski discussion a week ago--but I think a lot of that had to do with you posting essentially the same comment at three different places in the same thread. I don't think it started getting downvoted until then.
lalos 7y ago
Could also be selfishness, I remember reading an article about leaked internal Facebook employees where some employees would pressure others to not talk about privacy or sensitive topics because it would hurt the stock price further and therefore hurt all employees. I can't seem to find the article. I can see employees of big companies trying to sway or minimize decisions to feel like they are protecting their future earnings.
- plankers 7y ago
  "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." --Upton Sinclair
stareatgoats 7y ago
> Companies do actually employ shills to go on forums and try to sway public opinion I'm inclined to believe you, but sources please. Especially interested if you (or anyone) have anything on Google in this respect.
- cheschire 7y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/shills/ https://www.reddit.com/r/shills/ It's not going to be entirely legitimate but there's going to be some eye opening items in there for you I suspect.
  - mffnbs 7y ago
    Reddit investigators are not sources.
  - caiocaiocaio 7y ago
    Remember when Reddit investigated the Boston Marathon bombing and discovered that it was Sunil Tripathi? And then Mr. Tripathi went missing and his body was discovered several weeks later? Thank God we have Redditors to break the case.
    - targonca 7y ago
      >And then Mr. Tripathi went missing False. He went missing a month before the bombings: >Soon after, another redditor named Sunil as a plausible suspect after asserting a resemblance between the suspects in the FBI's pictures and Sunil, who had gone missing a month before the bombings. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunil_Tripathi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunil_Tripathi
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- prophesi 7y ago
  Not exactly a company, but if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party is a thing, I can't imagine that it's not also happening in a corporate context.
navigatesol 7y ago
>Companies do actually employ shills to go on forums and try to sway public opinion. This is the lazy and ignorant method of dismissing other people's arguments. Shill or not, what does it matter if what they state are facts?
- axaxs 7y ago
  Because literally anything is a fact, when worded the right way. In fact, that's most of what is wrong with the state of our 'News' today. Even little word changes can be used to sway public opinion (ex: 'victim' vs 'drunk woman', in a case an assault victim happened to have been drinking).
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    I confess that I've also never really understood why people are so outraged by the hypothetical it likely presence of actual shills: it's not like the population of non-shill commenters doesn't already produce every stupid and inane take possible. Shills can shift the composition of votes and comments away from a given board's biases (towards their preferred biases), but what does that change from the perspective of you, the reader? Why would you engage differently with a terrible take from a paid shill and a terrible take from someone dumb enough to sincerely believe it? This seems especially the case on anonymous or pseudonymous fora, where you've already given up hope of leaning on known character as a prior (and IMO that's an excuse for skipping critical thought much of the time anyway).
    - axaxs 7y ago
      Critical thinking is one thing, but that's not always or even usually the point of such campaigns. It can be as simple as 'bandwagon effect', which regardless of how silly it is to believe people behave that way, they absolutely do. Few people want to be on the unpopular side of an opinion.
      - bryan_w 7y ago
        Yeah, I notice this every time there's a story about Facebook or Google, there's always a group of posts that are exclaiming how great their life is since they deleted their account. It's super creepy
oneepic 7y ago
...is this supposed to prove or suggest that Google does the same?
joelx 7y ago
Nation states employ shills to attack other countries best companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. There has been a sustained PR campaign against our companies. Dictatorships use Whataboutism to help cover stuff like this... https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/cz75gj/hong_kong_police_beat_and_broke_this_teenagers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/cz75gj/hong_kong_poli...
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
I've seen a huge number of accusations that people espousing my views are shills in some thread here or on reddit. I'm sure there are paid shills, and even in large numbers. I'd bet it's a problem. But we have to be reeeeeeeeallly careful about throwing that label around. When you're wrong, you shutting down discourse by effectively saying the other person isn't even a person. This gets us to far more extreme us-vs-them dynamics than otherwise possible.
ColanR 7y ago
I recall that this is exactly what Monsanto was caught doing about a year ago, to cover up the dangerous effects of the chemicals they used (iirc). Paid shills on the internet who had facts at the ready to disprove Monsanto's bad actions, and were willing to use 'conspiracy theorist' to shut up anyone who didn't believe them. And, the facts they used came from legit-looking research, which Monsanto was also exposed to have created fraudulently, by suppressing bad results and elevating 'good' results.
dang 7y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877072.

>I was branded as a 'privacy nut' Companies do actually employ shills to go on forums and try to sway public opinion. They call them something like public advocates, doesn't change the idea though.

kaolti 7y ago

I get the feeling this is much more prevalent than any of us realize. Would explain why most comments seem ridiculous.

tboyd47 7y ago
You mean how there are somehow always commenters in every topic ready to leap to the defense of China and major US tech companies?
- dpkonofa 7y ago
  Meh. I would probably be considered (and have been called) a shill for Apple because I tend to defend them way more than most and it's very popular in tech communities to host anti-Apple circlejerks. I have yet to be paid by them for any of my pro-Apple posts.
- derefr 7y ago
  I would guess that those are, more often than not, not paid shills but rather just people who like taking devil’s-advocate sides in arguments “for fun”, i.e. just for the challenge of seeing if they can construct a valid rebuttal to a comment. (I say this because I believe I’ve done this myself more than once, and I know my personality-type isn’t uncommon on HN.)
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    A simpler explanation is that they are individuals defending against what they perceive as a personal attack via 'tribal' affiliations.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      How about people who simply are commenting against what they consider to be bullshit? I've commented here defending China on some issue a few times in the past. I have no ties with the country (except being on a business trip in Shenzhen for two months), nobody paid or even offered to pay me to do it. It's just I hate bullshit, especially when it becomes popular opinion. Just because China has serious issues doesn't mean it's the Devil and everything it does is evil. It's a country, not unlike Russia or the US. (Particular things I've been addressing in the past are a) treating a billion+ population as if it was a small country, and b) blaming China for all cheap mass produced crap and its environmental impact, conveniently forgetting that they aren't doing it for fun, but to fulfill orders from Western companies.)
      - mannykannot 7y ago
        Yeah - I can recognize a little bit of me in that (the bugged by bad arguments part). The answer is probably e) all of the above.
      - riversflow 7y ago
        Really confused about b) as I see it, a nation must be its own steward and we must all be stewards of the world. My understanding is that China is environmentally devastated. If that’s true it is completely the fault of the Chinese, not the fault of those that asked of them to do it. Other countries have stricter rules, so companies choose not to do business there. Especially in developing countries that limits growth, but the local environment benefits. Also the factory orders were coming from multinational corporations, they have no real allegiance with the West, they disrupt Western political, taxation and legal systems just like anywhere else. Moreover, consumers don’t realize the damage they are causing if you let a corporation completely externalized the associated costs,(this is not a uniquely Chinese problem) and markets won’t pick the correct winner in those conditions either, who cares if $CHEAPPLASTICGOOD will last a tenth as long if it’s essentially free? China has not only enabled western consumerism, it disrupted the natural economic forces that would prevent such a thing from arising in the first place. To the detriment of the both parties and the world, all because they didn’t respect their environment and thirsted for power. Please explain how this rational is wrong.
  - captainbland 7y ago
    I feel like on a place like this site where there are occasionally job postings and networking opportunities, there's an element of "my comments are my CV/resume" which biases some people towards defending/advocating for companies just in case it affects their career prospects.
  - ajna91 7y ago
    Agreed, I see this often. To be honest if the devil is far more powerful in a given situation, I find it distasteful to fight for him against the hurt party.
  - Zarath 7y ago
    At least in the case of corporate defense, most of them are the "free market solves everything" types who believe that if completely left alone, business will turn the world into some utopia.
- panarky 7y ago
  Yes, definitely. And there are also paid propagandists who attack Google at every opportunity, while ignoring far worse behavior by Google's competitors. I'd really like to know what percentage of online content is authentic, and what percentage is paid astroturf to shape public opinion by business interests and ideological/political campaigns.
  - close04 7y ago
    > while ignoring far worse behavior by Google's competitors. That’s because whataboutism ia rarely an excuse, if ever. At best it could offer some context. But given the sheer scale of Google’s operations there's not much context to add. They have both the power to do everything on a massive scale: both the violations and the subsequent “opinion shaping”. The only reason mentioning a competitor would be relevant in many Google related topics is as a distraction. I don’t have to care about the competitors to be 100% correct when attacking Google. On the other hand I got downvoted into oblivion even when comparing Google to competitors with undisputed data. My subjective experience is that the pro-Google camp is doing more overtime on the interwebs. And it makes sense that they would be more organized since they are working under one umbrella with more or less one voice. I find it hard to believe that all anti-Google parties would manage to reach anything close to the same level of organization and alignment of goals.
    - panarky 7y ago
      > the pro-Google camp is doing more overtime on the interwebs By "pro-Google camp" do you mean paid shills trolling and astroturfing to promote Google? If so, I'd love a cite or three, because I haven't heard of pro-Google astroturfing campaigns. Doesn't mean they don't exist, but I have heard of very real anti-Google campaigns sponsored by business competitors and ideological warriors.
      - close04 7y ago
        I clearly said it’s my subjective experience. On top of that I just heard things the same way you did. Also some common sense. Is your implication that ideological warriors can only exist on one side, against Google? Or that Google would resort to plenty of things that are borderline immoral or illegal but they draw the line at playing the PR card to make it look better? How about some of the thousands of employees that support the company line? You have switched between “whatabout the other guys” and “Google never does this but all their ideological warrior opponents do”. The wording alone is already suspiciously aggressive, not to mention the naive implication that a company like Google would not resort to something all of its opponents are (apparently) doing. Perhaps Google’s real strength is getting people to blindly support their crap. You see, it doesn’t actually have to be a “campaign” if all they did was train people to distract and constantly point the finger at others, pretend everybody else is bad but Google can’t be, and try to censor (via downvotes, reports, etc.) any internet opinion that doesn’t conform. Might sound weird but it’s more or less a literal summary of what you did in the previous 2 comments.
- philwelch 7y ago
  I'm fairly confident China (and for that matter Russia, but we all knew that) do this. As for tech companies, I would honestly mark a lot of that down to fanboyism. Not that I'd be entirely surprised, but I somewhat doubt that Elon Musk, in particular, is actually paying all of those people. And Tesla seems to have the most defensive supporters on the internet. People talk about Facebook and Google for their privacy practices, Apple for their crappy laptop keyboards, but it's a tiny minority that goes after Tesla when they're the company least capable of hiring people to argue on the internet. (I would also assume that it's a little bit overrated how often this happens, for the sole reason that I spend a lot of time arguing on the internet and never once have I received an offer to go pro!)
  - fmajid 7y ago
    China or Russia don't need to pay shills in all case, there are always nationalists to do it for free. In other cases, it's Stockholm Syndrome. As for paid shills, there is an entire sub-industry of PR called "Reputation management" devoted to this.
    - paganel 7y ago
      I used to read a Financial Times article from either 2011 or 2012 (can’t remember exactly) where some Israeli military person was confirming that Israel was using what we now call shill accounts (he used a different, more pleasantly sounding term). If Israel does it I’m pretty sure Russia and China do it, too. (I don’t have a direct link to said FT article, just a photo I took of said military person’s quote which is somewhere on one of my computers)
    - philwelch 7y ago
      > As for paid shills, there is an entire sub-industry of PR called "Reputation management" devoted to this. Sure. But there are also fanboys everywhere. Between presumption of good faith, Occam's Razor, Hanlon's Razor, and the breadth and depth of fanboyism I've seen online, my default presumption is always "fanboy" over "shill". Similar to your point about nationalists.
  - aphextim 7y ago
- kaolti 7y ago
  You know it.
aserafini 7y ago
It doesn’t even require a ‘paid agent’ theory to explain. Large companies actively court allegiance from their employees and spend serious effort to retain it by, for example, relentlessly offering mandatory courses in the company’s Cultural Values and evaluating promotions through that lens. So it’s not surprising that some BigTech employees are going to actively defend their employer’s values on forums. The best way to understand modern tech company culture is to consider them all very successful cults.
- philwelch 7y ago
  I don't know if Google is different in this regard, but every tech company I've worked at has forbidden me from "actively defending my employer's values on forums". Maybe not in so many words, but at the very least there's a prohibition against commenting on the company's business on the internet. PR depends a lot on message discipline, which is not what you get from random employees jumping into these arguments.
- mfg76 7y ago
  Ive even created an account to answer this. It's true that most of these companies have cultural values trainings and a bunch of policies, but it's naive to assume that the hired top 1% will follow these policies or even take them seriously. They are smart enough to not get caught (as if anybody cares to catch them), but that's about it. The today's employment model is a no strings attached contract: the employment can be terminated for no reason at any moment without a notice. This is a double edged sword: not only it gives the company flexibility to fire anyone they don't like, it makes employees mostly indifferent about the company as long as it cuts the paycheck. A typical software engineer does a 4 year gig and when the stock vesting plan ends, he moves on to another gig. There is no reason to take seriously policies of a company he worked at 10 years ago. And regarding evaluating promotions thru the cultural values lens. Yawn. There's no money in promotions. For a cult to be successfull, its members need to be bound by something more serious than a company values training they watch once a year.
navigatesol 7y ago
>Would explain why most comments seem ridiculous. Or maybe people have widely differing views on all kinds of subjects? I've been called all kinds of things, which I definitely am not, so I'm inclined to think that people put far to much weight on the conspiracies.

kspacewalk2 7y ago

Should their point of view just not be heard then, in such discussions?

whatshisface 7y ago
Is it really a point of view, or is it a carefully engineered sequence of words designed to program people with certain opinions? There are lots of ways to "program" people that bypass their rational mind, and creating a false sense of social consensus is one of them.
- danieldk 7y ago
  Also, I noticed that some submissions unfavorable to Google seem to be flagged heavily (at least, they were posted more recently and had more upvotes, than higher-ranking submissions). Of course, posting and flagging may not be intentional policy of Google, but also the work of individual Google employees.
  - kerng 7y ago
    I totally can confirm this! It's gotten a little better over the years but still being critical of Google gets you downvoted and flagged quickly. Also worth highlighting that many HN members work for Google, so they have less incentive to shine light on these issues, sometimes maybe even defend Google.
hobofan 7y ago
Not if it's disguised as a private individual (which is the default assumption in discussion forums such as this one). If a company wants to present its views, they can do so via press releases or clearly mark their posts as such (or via verified accounts like on Twitter).
- kart23 7y ago
  Honest question: under which law? Does anything actually prohibit companies from employing people from going on forums and shilling? I think it's perfectly fine for the third party platform to have a policy forbidding this, but the government enforcing something like this would not be ok.

narcoleptic 7y ago

I used to wonder if this was the case. Would you have any idea how their performance is measured by their employers?

paulcole 7y ago

What's more likely: that Google's willing to risk being outed for employing shills or that there are people who actually hold the opposing viewpoint? Personally I tend to think of most people on HN as privacy nuts. Honestly of all the problems in the world to get worked up over, online advertising is pretty low on my list. There's nothing I can do about Google/FB/whatever, so why even think about it. If Google or whoever wants to pay me to keep posting, I'm listening.

whatshisface 7y ago
>that Google's willing to risk being outed for employing shills This risk might be lower than you think, the key phrase is, "we didn't realize that the marketing firm we contracted was subcontracting to other, shadier marketing firms, who themselves aren't evil, but fell in with the wrong crowd and ended up trusting a yet deeper level of marketing firm, who was in fact evil."
Beldin 7y ago
> There's nothing I can do about Google/FB/whatever, so why even think about it. Actually, of all the stuff going on in the world, this is the one thing where you have an actual degree of control that matters. Sure, one individual won't change business policies. But: you can easily take steps to prevent or reduce the amount of data these companies have on you. Don't use their services, use an ad blocker, use tracking preventing, etc. You can even easily tailor it to your specific needs. Compared to stuff like Brexit, fires in the Amazon, Hong Kong, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, attacks on democracy in Turkey, Hungary etc., it is trivial to do something against Google/FB that has at least the effect of protecting you.
daxorid 7y ago
online advertising is pretty low on my list The threat that Google's tracking infrastructure represents is not limited to ads. If they stayed in their proverbial lane and used their panopticon exclusively to sell me things, many of us wouldn't mind as much as we do. But they lend the power and reach of their machine to governments, whether it's China looking to smoke out dissidents, or the NSA PRISM program, or even the DEA itching to score another weed possession arrest, Google gladly and happily does whatever governments ask of them, frequently with no warrant required.

Aunche 7y ago

I'm no marketing expert, but I doubt that the best way Google can think of to sway public opinion is to call people privacy nuts. Google employs over 100,000 people and even more people work at similar companies like Facebook or buy targeted ads. Many of these people browse Hackernews and get offended if others accuse their livelihoods of being evil.

paul7986 7y ago
I can attest to that as when you point of things like Google gets caught stealing IP from a MIT student they invited for an interview (a popular thread here on HN) it gets downvoted voraciously. Either its employees, hired guns and or something...
- philwelch 7y ago
  Or maybe that particular story didn't really stand on its merits. I never saw the thread, but from my perspective (which is increasingly skeptical of Google), any sort of "stealing IP from interview candidates" theory doesn't make much sense.
  - paul7986 7y ago
    It did receive almost 2k upvotes on HN. Further She has emails from Google ATAP(one of their supposed R&D departments) in which they note they invalidated her patent after getting caught... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18566929
- belltaco 7y ago
  I have noticed this pattern over several years. A few of the times it trips the flamebait detector and gets buried. Negative stories about other big tech companies don't seem to have the same issue with staying up.
- tzs 7y ago
  I saw that happen to you when you pointed that out in the big Anthony Levandowski discussion a week ago--but I think a lot of that had to do with you posting essentially the same comment at three different places in the same thread. I don't think it started getting downvoted until then.

lalos 7y ago

Could also be selfishness, I remember reading an article about leaked internal Facebook employees where some employees would pressure others to not talk about privacy or sensitive topics because it would hurt the stock price further and therefore hurt all employees. I can't seem to find the article. I can see employees of big companies trying to sway or minimize decisions to feel like they are protecting their future earnings.

plankers 7y ago
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." --Upton Sinclair

stareatgoats 7y ago

> Companies do actually employ shills to go on forums and try to sway public opinion I'm inclined to believe you, but sources please. Especially interested if you (or anyone) have anything on Google in this respect.

cheschire 7y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/shills/ https://www.reddit.com/r/shills/ It's not going to be entirely legitimate but there's going to be some eye opening items in there for you I suspect.
- mffnbs 7y ago
  Reddit investigators are not sources.
- caiocaiocaio 7y ago
  Remember when Reddit investigated the Boston Marathon bombing and discovered that it was Sunil Tripathi? And then Mr. Tripathi went missing and his body was discovered several weeks later? Thank God we have Redditors to break the case.
  - targonca 7y ago
    >And then Mr. Tripathi went missing False. He went missing a month before the bombings: >Soon after, another redditor named Sunil as a plausible suspect after asserting a resemblance between the suspects in the FBI's pictures and Sunil, who had gone missing a month before the bombings. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunil_Tripathi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunil_Tripathi
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
prophesi 7y ago
Not exactly a company, but if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party is a thing, I can't imagine that it's not also happening in a corporate context.

navigatesol 7y ago

>Companies do actually employ shills to go on forums and try to sway public opinion. This is the lazy and ignorant method of dismissing other people's arguments. Shill or not, what does it matter if what they state are facts?

axaxs 7y ago
Because literally anything is a fact, when worded the right way. In fact, that's most of what is wrong with the state of our 'News' today. Even little word changes can be used to sway public opinion (ex: 'victim' vs 'drunk woman', in a case an assault victim happened to have been drinking).
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  I confess that I've also never really understood why people are so outraged by the hypothetical it likely presence of actual shills: it's not like the population of non-shill commenters doesn't already produce every stupid and inane take possible. Shills can shift the composition of votes and comments away from a given board's biases (towards their preferred biases), but what does that change from the perspective of you, the reader? Why would you engage differently with a terrible take from a paid shill and a terrible take from someone dumb enough to sincerely believe it? This seems especially the case on anonymous or pseudonymous fora, where you've already given up hope of leaning on known character as a prior (and IMO that's an excuse for skipping critical thought much of the time anyway).
  - axaxs 7y ago
    Critical thinking is one thing, but that's not always or even usually the point of such campaigns. It can be as simple as 'bandwagon effect', which regardless of how silly it is to believe people behave that way, they absolutely do. Few people want to be on the unpopular side of an opinion.
    - bryan_w 7y ago
      Yeah, I notice this every time there's a story about Facebook or Google, there's always a group of posts that are exclaiming how great their life is since they deleted their account. It's super creepy

oneepic 7y ago

...is this supposed to prove or suggest that Google does the same?

joelx 7y ago

Nation states employ shills to attack other countries best companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. There has been a sustained PR campaign against our companies. Dictatorships use Whataboutism to help cover stuff like this... https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/cz75gj/hong_kong_police_beat_and_broke_this_teenagers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/cz75gj/hong_kong_poli...

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

I've seen a huge number of accusations that people espousing my views are shills in some thread here or on reddit. I'm sure there are paid shills, and even in large numbers. I'd bet it's a problem. But we have to be reeeeeeeeallly careful about throwing that label around. When you're wrong, you shutting down discourse by effectively saying the other person isn't even a person. This gets us to far more extreme us-vs-them dynamics than otherwise possible.

ColanR 7y ago

I recall that this is exactly what Monsanto was caught doing about a year ago, to cover up the dangerous effects of the chemicals they used (iirc). Paid shills on the internet who had facts at the ready to disprove Monsanto's bad actions, and were willing to use 'conspiracy theorist' to shut up anyone who didn't believe them. And, the facts they used came from legit-looking research, which Monsanto was also exposed to have created fraudulently, by suppressing bad results and elevating 'good' results.

dang 7y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20877072.