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The GMO might just be the fact that it's a part and part of the whole "I-fucking-love-science" technologist mindset (along with nuclear power, vaccination and some other similar topics, also discussed here) that's shared by a lot of nerds, which would tend to form an oversized share of Redditors, as they might be expected to do on online longform debate forums generally. I mean, I generally support nuclear power and vaccination, as well as GMOs, but I also readily recognize there are people who go beyond supporting them to making them shibboleth cure-alls for a variety of global problems with pretty much zero possible downsides, and who also readily search for perceived anti-technology heretics (hippies, conspiracy theorists, other general "Luddites") to struggle with; much of the COVID vaccination debate was fuelled by this, and it was obvious a lot of people supporting vaccine mandates did so not only or even primarily because they thought it would help fight COVID but also because it was a good way to punish those fucking idiot antivaxxers, a convenient online punching bag for years and years before Covid.
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if there were also GMO company bots shilling their products online, but the general pro-GMO online atmosphere also creates a fertile soil (pun not intended) for that shilling to succeed.
I also encountered a GMO astroturf account on an low-traffic local sub -- I'm fairly sure it was a real person, and it did encourage organic response from IFLS types you describe -- but if you looked at the post history it was all "arguing about GMOs on obscure subreddits".
I'm shocked that anyone finds Reddit important enough to run this sort of op on, but I'm pretty convinced that some people are either paid to do it, or both organized and ideological enough as a group to spend time repeating talking points.
Another example -- I have it on reasonably credible authority that the youth wing of the Liberal Party of Canada distributes specific talking points which its members then astroturf on the national and provincial subs whenever there's a controversy; you can see this because it's usually some legalistic nitpick that's repeated word for word by different (legitimate seeming) user accounts to create the impression of "politics as usual, nothing to see here, Conservatives are just too dump to understand what's happening".
I doubt that the LPC can afford to hire Chinese bot/troll farms -- but they don't need to because they have a readymade group of youngsters who care enough to do it for free. The key is the coordination of responses to create the impression of a reasoned consensus; again I don't see this as worth doing, because Reddit's userbase is overwhelmingly aligned with Young Liberals anyways -- but somebody important enough to coordinate this appears to disagree.
I am open to the possibility that better-resourced actors do something similar with for-hire agencies -- although this does seem like something that would eventually come to light in the form of "I was a Reddit consensus-manufacturer, AMA" type exposes.
Running that sort of op might also just be to generate cohesion among the liberal party. Propaganda goes both ways.
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I know what you mean and I saw that too but there was a certain kind of post, kind of a schema or template that appeared all over. Same arguments, same links (literally 20 or 30 or more), same reactions, same tone, different user name.
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