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Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

As far as I’m concerned Bayer and Monsanto are like evil incarnate and last time I brought up this lawsuit on HN I was shocked people were defending them. We’re talking about the company that intentionally sold HIV infected blood to people. If it was legal and they could increase profits by lighting people on fire they would do it. Yet people trust corrupt research that they paid for showing their product is safe.

Well their crap poison is on almost all the produce in every grocery store in the country so I guess they get the last laugh.

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> Bayer [...] intentionally sold HIV infected blood to people.

I had no idea about this. For anyone else that's curious:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/aids.suzannego... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood...

Not only impressively cynical but seems pretty reckless.

Jesus Christ.. Imagine being in jail for selling weed to someone who wanted it, meanwhile everyone that orchestrated this is still relaxing on their yachts. Unbelievable.

I love the fact that Beyer retired the Monsanto brand. It's a real bad sign when a company whose most famous product is Zyklon B tells you that your brand is toxic.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/04/monsanto-to...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zyklon_B

>people were defending them.

I believe that some company monitors websites like reddit and twitter for talk about Monsanto or Big Oil (fracking) and that company pays shills to defend them.

I mean, it would be strange that in 2022 HN would not be included in continuous campaigns to maintain good PR and keep getting baseless positive opinions, seed doubt and confusion to any criticism.

I would expect any big multinational corp to have few permanent people / external agency on permanent contract just for this. And considering how these corps in discussion are almost cartoonishly evil, there is probably a lot of work being done constantly.

Someone on reddit claimed he was on a US presidential campaign doing exactly that. Respond to posts with pre-made replies, if things got hairy, distract with humor or memes. Interestingly, they were aware when they were dealing with another paid shill from the opposing side.

After all those years on the internet I think I can also feel the impact of systematic forum activity; controversial topics that get swift, well articulated replies with links and upvotes. Another comment, declaring the winner of the debate!

Is it individual experts who weigh in, organically? Groups who are passionate about the topic and organize via Discord? Or professional shitposters and memers? Who can tell. But a few internet-addicted Reddit aficionados could cover a lot of topics in a lot of communities for a small salary and huge impact.

Hillary Clinton had a super PAC that did so openly:

"In April 2016, Correct the Record announced that it would be spending $1 million to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about Clinton in a "task force" called "Barrier Breakers 2016".[1][5] In addition to this, the task force aimed to encourage Sanders supporters to support Clinton and to thank both "prominent supporters and committed superdelegates".[6] The organization's president, Brad Woodhouse, said they had "about a dozen people engaged in [producing] nothing but positive content on Hillary Clinton" and had a team distributing information "particularly of interest to women".[7]"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record

If you watched r/politics and political humor back that it went from organic looking to the consent manufacturing factories they are today.

I don't know why you're singling HRC (it also wasn't her but David Brock, which is ironically the kind of misinformation designed to make her seem ultra-nefarious that CTR was formed to combat) out here; literally every issue and political campaign has activists doing this. They're called messaging and persuasion campaigns, and they include everything from yard signs to forum posters to ad buys. Do you have an issue with conservatives or pro-life activists doing this?

Your sort of low effort knee jerk response to a well researched informative comment is precisely why it's so hard to have rational discussion online. Can you not stay on topic and refrain from instigating polarisation for one minute? Do you have an opinion on these "persuasion campaigns"?

It's not well-researched; it has a single Wikipedia link, which it doesn't even represent properly (literally the first thing it says is CTR was founded by David Brock). It's also not informative; it presents a slanted, highly selective case against Clinton and Democratic/liberal/progressive politics. It's the Fox News of comments. It's also not on topic; how is CTR relevant to glyphosate?

I do have an opinion: Citizens United should be overturned, or we should have an Amendment clarifying that money isn't speech, so we can get rid of Super PACs. I also think the advertising industry should be regulated such that it's a shadow of what it is today.

It's a Wikipedia link with 7 references that is utterly neutrally formulated. If you think that's even close to how Fox News presents their abhorrent lies you can count yourself lucky to have not watched it ever.

In the meanwhile you apparently hold an opinion that is perfectly in line with the argument of the parent that you somehow assume is in support of Republican/regressive politics for no good reason. If you've got a better example of a SPAC that funded internet trolls you could just post a single Wikipedia link to that instead of making vague statements about slant.

There's one thing that the republicans are right about, and that's that Wikipedia, HN and most of reddit are biased against them, and that's because they're biased towards the truth and the whole republican platform is based around denying reality.

I think the Wikipedia article is great; no issues with it. What I take issue with is what I pointed out: parent is singling out HRC for founding something she didn't even found, even when the first sentence of his source says someone else founded it, in an effort to make her look nefarious despite the fact that Super PACs are something both sides (first Republicans, then Democrats in order to keep up in this race to the bottom) do as SOP, and as all issue campaigns have done since there have been issue campaigns.

> If you've got a better example of a SPAC that funded internet trolls you could just post a single Wikipedia link to that instead of making vague statements about slant.

Sure, let me introduce you to the Willkies [0] and anti-abortion PACs [1]. Both examples of people pushing their issue opinions into the public square (with doctored content and a lot of money I might add) or directly into getting people elected to make policies they'd like.

> reality is biased against republicans

100% agree. My only thing here was taking HRC's campaign totally out of context. This is how US politics works since Citizens United (ironically also a case where a group of people wanted to release a super negative video about her in the political ad blackout period [3]).

0: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/06/fetal-photos-jac...

1: https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs...

2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary:_The_Movie

Lots of companies provide that kind of monitoring as a service.

https://www.g2.com/products/dataminr/competitors/alternative...

Not sure if any of them also include PR/shilling, though.

This is a bigger problem than most realize.

I mean, it’s what I’d do. The cost is quite modest compared to the ability to sway public opinion. I’m seeing aggressive defense of nuclear power too. Either I’m underestimating the number of pro nuclear evangelists or there’s a paid lobby.

There was a dutch researcher that claimed that their weed killer was responsible for the wiping out of many insects, notably bees and bumblebees, but possibly others.

The man was ridiculed by his professional peers, whom later turned out to be bribed. The researcher was fully correct.

I don’t know which thread it was but I have seen the same thing. Apparently considering a company’s past actions when judging their current actions is “childish” because all the bad people left after they got in trouble and everyone there is good now. What a load of crap!

Yeah it’s a tough one. A “company” is just a box with people inside. Or maybe a “separating the artist from the art” type exercise. Bayer is a bit more nuanced for me than Monsanto

>As far as I’m concerned Bayer and Monsanto are like evil incarnate

Especially so when they were a subsidiary of IG Farben.

>The company had ties in the 1920s to the liberal German People's Party and was accused by the Nazis of being an "international capitalist Jewish company".[8] A decade later, it was a Nazi Party donor and, after the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933, a major government contractor, providing significant material for the German war effort. Throughout that decade it purged itself of its Jewish employees; the remainder left in 1938.[9] Described as "the most notorious German industrial concern during the Third Reich"[10] in the 1940s the company relied on slave labour from concentration camps, including 30,000 from Auschwitz,[11] and was involved in medical experiments on inmates at both Auschwitz and the Mauthausen concentration camp.[12][13] One of its subsidiaries supplied the poison gas, Zyklon B, that killed over one million people in gas chambers during the Holocaust.[b][15]

The Allies seized the company at the end of the war in 1945[a] and the US authorities put its directors on trial. Held from 1947 to 1948 as one of the subsequent Nuremberg trials, the IG Farben trial saw 23 IG Farben directors tried for war crimes and 13 convicted.[16]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben

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