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Comment by KennyBlanken | Hacker News Reader

A couple years ago there was a reddit account that did nothing but pop up like clockwork whenever Mons.anto was mentioned. It cited these ghostwritten studies, claiming that they were proof Gl..ypho-sate was safe.

It was so obvious other commenters would poke fun at them and tell other redditors to go look at their comment history.

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I'm a marketer, and when I see that sort of thing I have to question why nobody on their social team is seeing it be called out (for the crap that it is) and at the very least says "this is not performing well).

They've probably subcontracted and outsourced some of their reputation management to shitty providers. You see this all the time with SEO and link building, for example.

A large number of people probably just skim the top 5 comments. For them, seeing an astroturfed “actually X is great and here’s why” comment is enough for them. They’re not digging 8 levels deep into a thread until it’s finally shown that the person is decisively a shill.

It's this. Normal people might quickly read some comments on Reddit and then go on with their lives without digging into them, building a false consensus in their minds. They never really think to challenge what they read, not because they're dumb or anything like that, but because people only have so much time and energy to put towards critically analyzing what they see online.

Why did you spell Monsanto as Mons.anto and Glyphosate as Gl..ypho-sate ? Any specific thing you are trying to stay out of ?

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