[faeriechangling]

I have heard rants about Monsanto’s shill army for over a decade now, not just on HN but on every mid-sized or larger internet community I have ever been on, and not once have I actually seen a single person produce a shred of hard evidence substantiating it. I also notice right, if shills are so common every company ought to be sending their shills to influence HN, but I only ever hear Monsanto, no other big company, and no other big ag company accused of this. It’s not exactly easy to keep a massive long-term shilling operation secret when journalists would be chomping at the bit for a “Monsanto shill army proven” story and be willing to pay for proof.

At this point I’m utterly convinced that Monsanto doesn’t hire any shills and instead just does straightforwards propaganda work where they just convince people with slanted studied that they push to the top of Google search that sway people with reasonable sounding arguments (roundup makes food cheap!) and just wait for them to parrot these arguments and then for them to be accused of shilling making Monsanto’s opponents look unhinged. As evidenced by the plenty of actual evidence that they promote pro-roundup research and the plenty of actual evidence that they advertise stores that make roundup sound more safe.

Do you realize how self-sustaining contrarianism is when people consistently feed the contrarians ego by consistently, and wrongly, accusing them of being shills? Irrespective of who is right or wrong on the broader issue, the people accused of being shills are right that they aren’t shills so it’s basically a dopamine slam dunk to just side with Monsanto and have people line up to give a blatantly wrong opinion (that you are a shill). Which only causes a feedback loop because as the number of people seeking this dopamine hit grows, so does the EVIDENCE of SHILLS EVERYWHERE! Monsanto is best off just sitting back and eating popcorn and not spending a dime on shills.

[mandmandam]

Buddy, Exxon were caught astroturfing with the entire planet at stake, and suffered no real consequence. Big tobacco did it for decades, and those same companies are still marketing and selling to children in developing countries.

So why do you think "Monsanto" (it's Bayer now, keep up) would be scared of getting caught? Do you think they can't use a VPN, or subcontracting, or any of a hundred well developed ways to maintain plausible deniability? Do you really think "no other big company" gets accused of astroturfing?

You don't seem to have given any of this much thought tbh. Even if it's as you say, lol, why would you be happy with them doing "straightfowards propaganda work"? Have you followed the logical conclusions of your "contrarianism" theory more than a single step? Good luck to ye