I'm fairly confident China (and for that matter Russia, but we all knew that) do this.
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!)
I used to read a Financial Times article from either 2011 or 2012 (can’t remember exactly) where some Israeli military person was confirming that Israel was using what we now call shill accounts (he used a different, more pleasantly sounding term). If Israel does it I’m pretty sure Russia and China do it, too.
(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)
> As for paid shills, there is an entire sub-industry of PR called "Reputation management" devoted to this.
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 would guess that those are, more often than not, not paid shills but rather just people who like taking devil’s-advocate sides in arguments “for fun”, i.e. just for the challenge of seeing if they can construct a valid rebuttal to a comment. (I say this because I believe I’ve done this myself more than once, and I know my personality-type isn’t uncommon on HN.)
How about people who simply are commenting against what they consider to be bullshit?
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.)
Really confused about b) as I see it, a nation must be its own steward and we must all be stewards of the world. My understanding is that China is environmentally devastated. If that’s true it is completely the fault of the Chinese, not the fault of those that asked of them to do it. Other countries have stricter rules, so companies choose not to do business there. Especially in developing countries that limits growth, but the local environment benefits. 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.
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.
Your points are fair, and I'm not saying China isn't directly responsible for the environmental costs of both their internal and export manufacturing. But it's not fair to shift all of the blame, as some naïve or disingenuous people do, because most of the export manufacturing is either managed by and done for western companies (China being "the factory of the world"), or simply driven by the demand on western markets. In other words, their environmental impact is in large part caused by our consumerism. And if China decided to no longer serve as the world's 3D printer, you're correct that some other nation would probably take up that role - and those same naïve/disingenuous people would then decry that nation for all its environmental problems.
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.
>If China did not enable it, probably some other nation would.
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.
I feel like on a place like this site where there are occasionally job postings and networking opportunities, there's an element of "my comments are my CV/resume" which biases some people towards defending/advocating for companies just in case it affects their career prospects.
Agreed, I see this often.
To be honest if the devil is far more powerful in a given situation, I find it distasteful to fight for him against the hurt party.
At least in the case of corporate defense, most of them are the "free market solves everything" types who believe that if completely left alone, business will turn the world into some utopia.
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.
> while ignoring far worse behavior by Google's competitors.
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.
I clearly said it’s my subjective experience. On top of that I just heard things the same way you did. Also some common sense.
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.
