Comment by Cpoll
7 hours ago
> motivation to oppose junk food.
On social media, making dubious claims about food science or food ingredients, then following up by selling some "clean, unprocessed, organic" product is big business. (I make no claims about this specific NGO).
Yes - the obvious state of dysfunction in food regulation and lack of enforcement in that area has led to an abundance of scam supplement hawkers[1] but I don't think the right conclusion to draw from that is that all criticisms of food regulation are in bad faith - I think it's very fair to say "We should have a serious discussion about our food quality and also we need to crack down on these BS supplements". I think we're all[2] pretty well aligned on the fact that the BS supplements need the crack down but we also should introspect on why so many people are motivated to seek things like that out.
1. I personally enjoy a can of hogwater every day and am happy to give you a referral code.
2. Except those who financially benefit from hawking snake oil, of course.
astroturfing works, and is only getting better/worse depending on your point of view. it used to require people to read forums and make posts manually. now, you can automate that with a bot and in multiple languages.
It’s only bad if you value the pittance of social trust people occasionally still afford each other. That’s definitely not as cool as another vacation home and a shiny new gofast boat for some of the few thousand people in this country that actually benefit from this sort of large-scale manipulation.
What are you calling astroturfing? If anything, it would be the comment upthread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127343
"On social media, making dubious claims about food science or food ingredients, then following up by selling some "
So you're upset about something that hasn't happened yet?
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