<story><title>Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media</title><url>https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/monsantos-ghostwriting-to-influence</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve defended Monsanto repeatedly on HN (there are some extraordinarily popular beliefs about Monsanto that turn out, from what I can tell, to be just completely false, and they used to wind up here a bunch). I&amp;#x27;m not carrying any water for them. I&amp;#x27;m pro-GMO just in principle, but neutral-to-skeptical about any company of Monsanto&amp;#x27;s size. I&amp;#x27;m sure the company itself is perfectly amoral. I&amp;#x27;m just calling actual issues like I see them.&lt;p&gt;Naturally, plenty of people on HN think I&amp;#x27;m a paid shill (what makes this funnier is the company I founded and worked at for most of my time on HN was named &amp;quot;Matasano&amp;quot;, which was so frequently confused for &amp;quot;Monsanto&amp;quot; that we put a sign on our window about it in our Mountain View office).&lt;p&gt;My point is just: your intuition for whether comments are paid shillage are likely to mislead you.</text></item><item><author>diogenescynic</author><text>Monsanto also pays shills to comment positively about pesticide use and try to brow beat anyone who is has a negative opinion their products. It&amp;#x27;s crazy how aggressive it is. Basically any thread on Twitter or Reddit the same users will defend Monsanto. You see the same thing about other controversial products, such as BPAs. It seems like some tactic they learned from Big Tobacco and Big Oil to just push as much doubt&amp;#x2F;skepticism as possible to make the public nihilistic&amp;#x2F;cynical. Meanwhile, most of these products don&amp;#x27;t even need to be used. We&amp;#x27;re just letting a few companies pollute the earth and get rich for a minor gain of convenience to the public.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>epgui</author><text>+1&lt;p&gt;I’m a biochemist and while I’m not interested in sticking my neck out to defend any company, a lot of the criticism directed at Monsanto is unfair, uninformed and&amp;#x2F;or unintelligent.&lt;p&gt;This is particularly true of criticism levied against glyphosate (one of the least-bad herbicides I know of) and GMOs (which people are usually just super confused about).&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: zero conflict of interest, I make all my money building software in the non-bio world.</text></comment>
<story><title>Monsanto’s ghostwriting to influence science and media</title><url>https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/monsantos-ghostwriting-to-influence</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve defended Monsanto repeatedly on HN (there are some extraordinarily popular beliefs about Monsanto that turn out, from what I can tell, to be just completely false, and they used to wind up here a bunch). I&amp;#x27;m not carrying any water for them. I&amp;#x27;m pro-GMO just in principle, but neutral-to-skeptical about any company of Monsanto&amp;#x27;s size. I&amp;#x27;m sure the company itself is perfectly amoral. I&amp;#x27;m just calling actual issues like I see them.&lt;p&gt;Naturally, plenty of people on HN think I&amp;#x27;m a paid shill (what makes this funnier is the company I founded and worked at for most of my time on HN was named &amp;quot;Matasano&amp;quot;, which was so frequently confused for &amp;quot;Monsanto&amp;quot; that we put a sign on our window about it in our Mountain View office).&lt;p&gt;My point is just: your intuition for whether comments are paid shillage are likely to mislead you.</text></item><item><author>diogenescynic</author><text>Monsanto also pays shills to comment positively about pesticide use and try to brow beat anyone who is has a negative opinion their products. It&amp;#x27;s crazy how aggressive it is. Basically any thread on Twitter or Reddit the same users will defend Monsanto. You see the same thing about other controversial products, such as BPAs. It seems like some tactic they learned from Big Tobacco and Big Oil to just push as much doubt&amp;#x2F;skepticism as possible to make the public nihilistic&amp;#x2F;cynical. Meanwhile, most of these products don&amp;#x27;t even need to be used. We&amp;#x27;re just letting a few companies pollute the earth and get rich for a minor gain of convenience to the public.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>colordrops</author><text>Often an intuition as to whether a particular comment is a paid shill is inaccurate, but one cannot deny that there are clear trends that indicate that paid shilling is occurring in general for a particular topic or organization.  There are swarms of posts and comments with the same talking points that you find on the company&amp;#x27;s website, small subreddits in support of them that have no real reason to exist other than as aggregators of talking points, and an exaggerated responses to seemingly non-controversial statements that go against the company.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not some lizard man conspiracy that bot nets and sock puppet accounts exist.  In fact they are a pretty standard MO on the internet.</text></comment>