Monsanto accused by legal opponents of hiring internet trolls | Hacker News Reader

Monsanto accused by legal opponents of hiring internet trolls

baumhedlundlaw.com

95 pointsvaleg39 comments

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?

I like that you're asking the right question. I have a number of ideas, but none are very clean or simple answers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Doesn't sound like a solution that gets a ton of people rich... pass! /s

> 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?

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.

Yes, you are

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?

>folks don't question anything they read on the internet

(summary: Even if people were to quit believing what they read, claims against Monsanto would be among those claims disbelieved, so Monsanto still wins.)

Because you quickly run in to the "poisoned wine" problem. You can't pick the wine in front of you because the King might have poisoned it, but you can't pick the wine in front of him because he might be expecting you to pick it, but he might have thought that you would have expected him to pick it and then put it in front of you... So at the end the knowledge that one cup is poisoned doesn't help you pick which one to drink.

In the same way, if everything you read could have been written by a troll, and if you can't de-troll it by identifying which cause they are subtly going after, the sentence becomes non-information. If everything you read could be trolling, then every sentence becomes non-information. You're left alone in a crowd of millions, because whether or not the person talking to you is a shill, useful idiot, or enlightened freedom fighter, you're not going to trust them.

In other words, Monsanto can halt all communication about Monsanto, without having to prevent anyone from talking. They just have to bring the average correctness of any statement about Monsanto low enough, and then there will be no point in reading.

So, faced with the option of completely disregarding everything they read on the internet (thereby, essentially, ending their use of it), most people just shoulder the risk and assume good faith, hoping that the benefits of the true information that they end up believing will not be outweighed by the false information they end up believing. As long as the false information is kept to a low enough level this is an acceptable bargain.

Yes, a decade ago people said this about wikipedia, but instead told you to trust other encyclopedia's. Those ended up being wrong just as often as this thing everyone can edit, which made the whole point kind of moot.

If the core message had always been "use more than one source, and use sources that are not connected" that would have been a lot more sensible. But in my experience this has not been the message, and even in the instances that it was people tried to work around it because it was inconvenient.

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 ;)

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

A Shill Defence Force® that lures them into never ending flamewars, so the rest of us can post in peace. I like it. Someone needs to start a fundraiser and get the mechanical turk going.

Don't underestimate the danger of falsehoods going unopposed in forums.

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.

What you're describing is a simple false flag attack. They wouldn't be the first to use it.

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 office, due to the related spelling).

There's a reason that there's a rule in the HN guidelines about not implying shillage here. It's an easy rhetorical out, and people take it far too often. If you think a comment here is paid for or otherwise abusive, tell hn@ycombinator.com; don't post about it here.

> 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.

Precisely my position, "frankenfood" just grinds my gears.

Using the "shill argument" basically shuts down any possibility for an actual discussion or discourse. If you truly believe that a commentator is doing something like that, you should honestly just flag the comment and move on.

The entire point of HN, or at least in its attempt, is to be able to have meaningful conversations, and it will be to great detriment for the community if we allow rhetorical criticism like this to become more prevalent.

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.

> and HN

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.

> It happened only on Monsanto threads.

Go to any thread about China and you will read similar accusations. Sometimes people disagree with you.

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

We add question marks sometime as a way of de-baiting a controversial title.

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.

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