There are definitely some acting as spokespeople (even if they claim otherwise), but there are also quite a few who are just, you know, incredibly biased fans of their employer, who like to defend them on topics unrelated to their job.
But when a tech company has 100,000 employees, it's not particularly surprising to see a good number of them on a tech forum. ;)
They might just say, 'That seems silly!', 'You're a nut', 'Do you have a source other than yourself'. Or they might just downvote stories that have a negative effect on their income.
You've got 100k people working at google and many of them are going to be active on this type of forum. The same goes for the other big guys that have a ton of employees
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/21/facebook-...
This is all quite in the open.
If you see these kind of behavior online, it's almost always people paid to explicitly monitor forums and "protect" a company image.
Either its employees, hired guns and or something...
We've been over this topic a gazillion times on this site: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... Astroturfing exists, but imagined projections of astroturfing are far more common, and whatever the effects of the former may be, the latter has an extremely degrading effect on discussion. In fact it eats up everything if you let it. We don't want that here.
I've personally banned several accounts over the years for propagandizing for Google (for whatever reason—it's impossible to distinguish between a paid agent and an overzealous fan, nor does it particularly matter). But this has been rare, and we don't do it without evidence.
Is Hacker News not a place where freedom of speech is welcome? Speech that is helpful to other not well connected innovators who when invited by the big G read this and tell the big G no I'm not going to take that meeting!
Overall I'm confused as to why you call my story and Jie Qi's story spam? Do you not think her story is true and or mine is? That is not helpful for other not well connected and or rich innovators?
Separately, there was an issue with your copy-pasting the same comment about this story repeatedly in a previous thread. That is what I called spamming (not the actual story). Doing that is no doubt what led to your being downvoted, rather than manipulation as you implied above.
In cases where the story is relevant, of course it's fine to discuss it. But I don't see that it's relevant here, and your history of bringing it up in ways that break the site guidelines suggest that the bar for relevance needs to be higher than how you've been drawing it.
But the main point is that you can't make up sinister stories about why you got downvoted ("I can attest...") and post them here. Long experience has shown that nearly all such comments are baseless, and as I just said, they eat everything if you let them. Therefore we mustn't let them.
Ive never knew or heard about an astroturf guideline before. Thanks for pointing it out ... i was trying to start a debate as I wasnt sure if my comment was downvoted voraciously because of multiple posts or something else?
As for telling my story and or Jie Qi's similar one in posts that detail other bad behavior from Google I wonder how that isn't relevant? Per the upvotes HN readers must feel it holds relevance? Though you don't think pointing out that Google steals/gets caught stealing IP is relevant to other posts detailing more/other examples of their bad behavior?
I've written a bunch about this over the years if you or anyone wants more explanation: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Though are you saying I should never talk about Google getting caught stealing IP where it's relevant on Hacker News(have you censored other members b4 on certain topics)? It does not satisfy readers curiosity or is helpful to other dreamers/innovators, ones who dont have Joi Ito (MIT student's advisor) on their side, in whats the best way forward when Google R&D sends an invite?
Ive been a HN reader and commenter since 2007 and spoken freely since. I hope I am to continue to do so!
Further She has emails from Google ATAP(one of their supposed R&D departments) in which they note they invalidated her patent after getting caught...
--Upton Sinclair
As for tech companies, I would honestly mark a lot of that down to fanboyism. Not that I'd be entirely surprised, but I somewhat doubt that Elon Musk, in particular, is actually paying all of those people. And Tesla seems to have the most defensive supporters on the internet. People talk about Facebook and Google for their privacy practices, Apple for their crappy laptop keyboards, but it's a tiny minority that goes after Tesla when they're the company least capable of hiring people to argue on the internet.
(I would also assume that it's a little bit overrated how often this happens, for the sole reason that I spend a lot of time arguing on the internet and never once have I received an offer to go pro!)
Link from them doing this in 2010. I highly doubt it has slowed down or stopped.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LofScCiJT4c
The question still remains, are corporations doing this actively/knowingly or is it only governments that are doing the shilling.
As for paid shills, there is an entire sub-industry of PR called "Reputation management" devoted to this.
(I don’t have a direct link to said FT article, just a photo I took of said military person’s quote which is somewhere on one of my computers)
Sure. But there are also fanboys everywhere. Between presumption of good faith, Occam's Razor, Hanlon's Razor, and the breadth and depth of fanboyism I've seen online, my default presumption is always "fanboy" over "shill". Similar to your point about nationalists.
I've commented here defending China on some issue a few times in the past. I have no ties with the country (except being on a business trip in Shenzhen for two months), nobody paid or even offered to pay me to do it. It's just I hate bullshit, especially when it becomes popular opinion. Just because China has serious issues doesn't mean it's the Devil and everything it does is evil. It's a country, not unlike Russia or the US.
(Particular things I've been addressing in the past are a) treating a billion+ population as if it was a small country, and b) blaming China for all cheap mass produced crap and its environmental impact, conveniently forgetting that they aren't doing it for fun, but to fulfill orders from Western companies.)
Moreover, consumers don’t realize the damage they are causing if you let a corporation completely externalized the associated costs,(this is not a uniquely Chinese problem) and markets won’t pick the correct winner in those conditions either, who cares if $CHEAPPLASTICGOOD will last a tenth as long if it’s essentially free? China has not only enabled western consumerism, it disrupted the natural economic forces that would prevent such a thing from arising in the first place. To the detriment of the both parties and the world, all because they didn’t respect their environment and thirsted for power. Please explain how this rational is wrong.
In other words: it's bad that China is offering, but it's also bad for the west to take them up on that offer.
> Also the factory orders were coming from multinational corporations, they have no real allegiance with the West, they disrupt Western political, taxation and legal systems just like anywhere else.
That's IMO just giving up. Corporations are not yet independent governments, they should still be taken to account in the countries they originate from and those they operate in.
> China has not only enabled western consumerism, it disrupted the natural economic forces that would prevent such a thing from arising in the first place.
Not sure what they disrupted. It looks to me they played by the books, simply arbitraging labor costs like everyone else does in a global economy. Still, it's a feedback loop - China is enabling western consumerism, but growing consumerism is driving further growth in environmentally unsound manufacturing, most of which happens in China. If China did not enable it, probably some other nation would. It's a feedback loop, and both sides of it are to blame.
I’ll point the finger at any country who lets their national environment(which is really a global resource, we all share the same air and oceans) get trashed in the name of industrialization to serve consumerism. Western countries have a system that controls those externalities at least to some extent, in the US we have the EPA, OSHA, and our various institutions of permitting make sure of that, at a very real cost to businesses and consumers. By not caring about the environment developing countries absolutely are burdening the species long term. The lack of a level playing field in this regard enables consumerism because you are allowing consumers to not pay for externalities, else we should really be placing tariffs on any country who doesn’t meet at least EPA regulations and probably all of our regulations and laws—building, safety, worker compensation—but that would likely shock the global economic system. This is what “developing” countries disrupt, and why I think that ultimately globalization and environmentalism(which I prioritize personally right now) are incompatible. This is a problematic conclusion because war is probably worse for the environment and globalism is the only thing that’s made this era so relatively peaceful.
I don’t think you can blame both sides, because on one side you have a relatively organized group of people with power who rule a country, and on the other you have a mass of people with 0 organization and no structural power whatsoever. Blaming the /populace/ of any country for a problem is a very slippery slope indeed.
And there are also paid propagandists who attack Google at every opportunity, while ignoring far worse behavior by Google's competitors.
I'd really like to know what percentage of online content is authentic, and what percentage is paid astroturf to shape public opinion by business interests and ideological/political campaigns.
That’s because whataboutism ia rarely an excuse, if ever. At best it could offer some context. But given the sheer scale of Google’s operations there's not much context to add. They have both the power to do everything on a massive scale: both the violations and the subsequent “opinion shaping”.
The only reason mentioning a competitor would be relevant in many Google related topics is as a distraction. I don’t have to care about the competitors to be 100% correct when attacking Google.
On the other hand I got downvoted into oblivion even when comparing Google to competitors with undisputed data. My subjective experience is that the pro-Google camp is doing more overtime on the interwebs. And it makes sense that they would be more organized since they are working under one umbrella with more or less one voice. I find it hard to believe that all anti-Google parties would manage to reach anything close to the same level of organization and alignment of goals.
By "pro-Google camp" do you mean paid shills trolling and astroturfing to promote Google?
If so, I'd love a cite or three, because I haven't heard of pro-Google astroturfing campaigns.
Doesn't mean they don't exist, but I have heard of very real anti-Google campaigns sponsored by business competitors and ideological warriors.
Is your implication that ideological warriors can only exist on one side, against Google? Or that Google would resort to plenty of things that are borderline immoral or illegal but they draw the line at playing the PR card to make it look better? How about some of the thousands of employees that support the company line?
You have switched between “whatabout the other guys” and “Google never does this but all their ideological warrior opponents do”. The wording alone is already suspiciously aggressive, not to mention the naive implication that a company like Google would not resort to something all of its opponents are (apparently) doing.
Perhaps Google’s real strength is getting people to blindly support their crap. You see, it doesn’t actually have to be a “campaign” if all they did was train people to distract and constantly point the finger at others, pretend everybody else is bad but Google can’t be, and try to censor (via downvotes, reports, etc.) any internet opinion that doesn’t conform. Might sound weird but it’s more or less a literal summary of what you did in the previous 2 comments.
So it’s not surprising that some BigTech employees are going to actively defend their employer’s values on forums.
The best way to understand modern tech company culture is to consider them all very successful cults.
The today's employment model is a no strings attached contract: the employment can be terminated for no reason at any moment without a notice. This is a double edged sword: not only it gives the company flexibility to fire anyone they don't like, it makes employees mostly indifferent about the company as long as it cuts the paycheck. A typical software engineer does a 4 year gig and when the stock vesting plan ends, he moves on to another gig. There is no reason to take seriously policies of a company he worked at 10 years ago. And regarding evaluating promotions thru the cultural values lens. Yawn. There's no money in promotions.
For a cult to be successfull, its members need to be bound by something more serious than a company values training they watch once a year.
Or maybe people have widely differing views on all kinds of subjects?
I've been called all kinds of things, which I definitely am not, so I'm inclined to think that people put far to much weight on the conspiracies.
I'm inclined to believe you, but sources please. Especially interested if you (or anyone) have anything on Google in this respect.
Full thread in a nicely readable format at https://www.thepoke.co.uk/2019/08/15/amazon-ambassadors-take...
[0] https://twitter.com/rulesObeyer/status/1161758672973811712
The book Merchants of Doubt highlights the practice across decades and industries.
Ralph Nader was subject to corporate smear tactics and surveillance in the 1970s.
The idea that companies would suddenly stop using these tactics the moment they become divinely powerful defies all reason.
Reddit's /r/shills and /r/HailCorporate highlight some modern instances.
It's not going to be entirely legitimate but there's going to be some eye opening items in there for you I suspect.
Thank God we have Redditors to break the case.
False. He went missing a month before the bombings:
>Soon after, another redditor named Sunil as a plausible suspect after asserting a resemblance between the suspects in the FBI's pictures and Sunil, who had gone missing a month before the bombings.
Dictatorships use Whataboutism to help cover stuff like this... https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/cz75gj/hong_kong_poli...
When you're wrong, you shutting down discourse by effectively saying the other person isn't even a person. This gets us to far more extreme us-vs-them dynamics than otherwise possible.
This is the lazy and ignorant method of dismissing other people's arguments. Shill or not, what does it matter if what they state are facts?
I don't want to sound like I think some "smart" people are somehow immune to this - I think everyone, regardless of their education or intelligence, is susceptible to this kind of group-think.
It's still not clear to me that I see why shills are such a cause for outrage, at least at a personal level: if a person's critical thinking abilities are impaired enough of people that they'd have their views appreciably changed by shills' voting patterns, the absence of shills just means they'd be blindly following the whims of online mobs. I can see how this is better, but just _barely_.
OTOH, for those who are capable of basic critical thinking, shills don't seem to have much power: if they make good points, then good, if they don't, then no harm done.
I just don't see how why bad comments are somehow worse when they're driven by payments instead of simply the stupidity of a normal person.
I can't relate to this impulse even a little bit, but believe that it's common. That being said, I don't see how its ubiquity makes it any less a failure of critical thinking ability.
The Internet is a pretty hostile environment for those whose epistemology depends on who's behind the pseudonym: it's not clear to me that shills are going to make these people much worse at thinking and processing information than they already are.
The same goes for those who do have appreciable critical thinking abilities: you shouldn't be credulously consuming the thoughts of any random pseudonym, and the same skeptical habits that inoculate you against dumb ideas from unpaid strangers work roughly as well on shills.
It's super creepy
First, please observe the principle of charity when posting.
> Shill or not, what does it matter if what they state are facts?
Because it is entirely possible to tell large lies using small facts.
Because propaganda and disinformation are actual, real things and are very difficult to combat once unleashed in the commons.
Because the "let the marketplace of ideas figure it out" excuse to not police propaganda and disinformation attacks is hopelessly naive at best, and deliberately ineffective at worst.
I'm John and I have views on privacy that are completely genuine and happen to align with what benefits the corporation(s) that my company, TotallyLegitimateComments LLC, contracts for. I believe advertisement is a force for good in the world and can bring together people and products that enrich their lives while creating value for shareholders! While I'd love to share what wonderful businesses my company works with, various privacy agreements prevent us from doing so. However, I can tell you that they all appreciate the fact that you find their views important! We will continue to lobby your congressmen on your behalf to ensure that these views are reflected in the nations laws! Thanks and remember, corporations are people like you and me!
Sincerely, John
https://twitter.com/AmazonFCHannah/status/116191039733676851...
I wonder what that says about the state of "truth" on the Internet.
https://gizmodo.com/how-an-investigation-of-fake-fcc-comment...
Of course, posting and flagging may not be intentional policy of Google, but also the work of individual Google employees.
It's gotten a little better over the years but still being critical of Google gets you downvoted and flagged quickly.
Also worth highlighting that many HN members work for Google, so they have less incentive to shine light on these issues, sometimes maybe even defend Google.
That said, I don't think there are nearly as many shills as some people think nor do I think they are very effective.
If a company wants to present its views, they can do so via press releases or clearly mark their posts as such (or via verified accounts like on Twitter).
IINAL, but since we are at the topic of laws, in the last years influencers (at least in Germany) had to fear hefty fines if they didn't label sponsored posts as such, as that counts for covert advertising. As astroturfing could be construed as advertising, that might fall under the same law.
Note also that "on behalf of" can only exist in response to some prior meeting (or deal) with certain members (board or employees) of the corporation who wish to push "its" policy.
Paying someone else to share a very sanitized, market researched version of your opinion while pretending that they're organically sharing their own opinion isn't that. It's dishonest, and it's eroding honest conversations for the sake of advertising.
Personally I tend to think of most people on HN as privacy nuts. Honestly of all the problems in the world to get worked up over, online advertising is pretty low on my list. There's nothing I can do about Google/FB/whatever, so why even think about it.
If Google or whoever wants to pay me to keep posting, I'm listening.
This risk might be lower than you think, the key phrase is, "we didn't realize that the marketing firm we contracted was subcontracting to other, shadier marketing firms, who themselves aren't evil, but fell in with the wrong crowd and ended up trusting a yet deeper level of marketing firm, who was in fact evil."
Actually, of all the stuff going on in the world, this is the one thing where you have an actual degree of control that matters.
Sure, one individual won't change business policies. But: you can easily take steps to prevent or reduce the amount of data these companies have on you.
Don't use their services, use an ad blocker, use tracking preventing, etc. You can even easily tailor it to your specific needs.
Compared to stuff like Brexit, fires in the Amazon, Hong Kong, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, attacks on democracy in Turkey, Hungary etc., it is trivial to do something against Google/FB that has at least the effect of protecting you.
The threat that Google's tracking infrastructure represents is not limited to ads. If they stayed in their proverbial lane and used their panopticon exclusively to sell me things, many of us wouldn't mind as much as we do.
But they lend the power and reach of their machine to governments, whether it's China looking to smoke out dissidents, or the NSA PRISM program, or even the DEA itching to score another weed possession arrest, Google gladly and happily does whatever governments ask of them, frequently with no warrant required.
Companies do actually employ shills to go on forums and try to sway public opinion. They call them something like public advocates, doesn't change the idea though.