• NickwithaC@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    What is with all the anti-meat industry posts popping up recently? It’s starting to feel like an astroturf campaign…

    • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
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      5 months ago

      Most likely more people being aware of it, and then people seeing those posts doing well leads to more posts like that

      Arguably, you should be moreso concerned about the opposite. The industry runs well known astroturfing campaigns:

      NCBA [National Cattlemen’s Beef Association] calls it “proactive reputation management”: a strategy that entails monitoring the internet for messaging opportunities, then leaping in to burnish beef’s image whenever it’s advantageous

      https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/03/beef-industry-public-relations-messaging-machine

      The meat industry has helped fund research and communications initiatives to minimize its links to climate change. And it has organized astroturf attacks on initiatives like EAT-Lancet

      https://newrepublic.com/article/177575/never-trust-green-meat

        • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
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          5 months ago

          There are plenty of other people posting about the meat industry. I’ve seen people making the same comments on places. It’s also in part because many people are just seeing the vegan circle jerk community posts on the all feed. That also shapes perception too

          One example of someone complaining about just that on someone else’s post (comment ended up getting removed by a mod because of other parts of their comment, but you can infer based on replies) https://lemmy.ml/post/16139346/11287396

          • Clent@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Yes. Mostly one topic posters.

            Vegans posting about the meat industry are the like non-gamers posting about the evils of the gaming industry with a dash of moral superiority.

            It’s weird for someone to center their entire online personality around something they do not do.

            • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
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              5 months ago

              The example honestly doesn’t make much sense to me. You take issue with someone daring to want to talk about the worker abuses in the gaming industry? Are we to forbid someone from being passionate about an issue?

              Someone caring about the harm in an industry doesn’t make them think they are “morally superior”. Posting about the harms in an industry is to raise awareness of that harm. It’s not about one self at all

              • Clent@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                Your passion is no different than that of the antiabortionists.

                You won’t accept nuance, you don’t want to have a discussion, you want your agenda to be heard and the world to bend to your view of how things ought to be.

                • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOP
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                  5 months ago

                  I do accept discussion, and rely heavily on source based discussion. I cite nearly everything I say. See how I cited two sources earlier when I made a claim about meat industry funded astroturfing

                  When people have critiques based on their own sources, or methodological/other critiques of the sources I provide, there is a good back and forth.

                  Even when other people never provide a single source, I still converse and provide sources for my claims

                  I qualify my claims to reflect what the data and research actually says. That’s what nuance looks like. When people argue for a specific claim that makes things more complicated, I respond to their claim about that specific issue. That’s also what nuance looks like

                  • Clent@lemmy.world
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                    5 months ago

                    Antiabortionists cite sources too. The passion and certainty are the same.

                    Vegans aren’t trying to clean up the food industry, they want to end it. Raising the issues with it just a means to that end. There are few if any vegans arguing for a cleaner animal husbandry practices.

                    Many vegans recognize it as a choice, like the abortion issue, they aren’t against any abortions they only choose not to themselves have an abortion. They aren’t discussing the horrors of the abortion industry on the internet.

                • 5C5C5C@programming.dev
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                  5 months ago

                  Your idea of nuance would have us all sitting on our hands while unsustainable industries make the world we live in uninhabitable and put an end to humanity as we know it.

                • TheCheddarCheese@lemmy.world
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                  5 months ago

                  Look at it another way - do we REALLY need that much meat production? Probably not. Vegans have been living just fine this whole tome, and meat is very resource intensive to produce anyway, so one could argue you’d get even more food from stopping.

                  Is it causing massive issues even aside from the suffering of animals? Yeah, agriculture plays quite a significant part in CO2 emissions. Not to mention the polluting of rivers.

                  Also, I don’t really see your point of ‘they don’t want to have a discussion’. You’re literally having a discussion with them right now.

            • Martineski@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              5 months ago

              I don’t commit genocide in ukraine and I very much don’t support it. Why would that be different for animals that are treated even worse?

            • dinkusmann@feddit.rocks
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              5 months ago

              Yeah, and those abolitionists man. Like, I get it, you don’t own slaves. Can’t they just shut up and lay off the slave owners?

              • Clent@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                Are you comparing animal husbandry to owning slaves?

                Militant vegans are a silly people.

                • dinkusmann@feddit.rocks
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                  5 months ago

                  Of course not. Animals are inferior by nature and were made to be owned by humans. It’s just the natural order of things. We even have a special word for it. We call it husbandry, isn’t that cute? Just like how a husband owns his wife, women being creatures that act on instincts and emotions instead of reason.

                  • Clent@lemmy.world
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                    5 months ago

                    You seem surprised that we have a special word for something that humans have been doing before written history.

                    Do you have any clever musings on the encompassing term, agriculture? Perhaps how it has culture in it and culture is emotions instead of reason.

                    I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. I assume the title is IaM14aNDtHisDEEP!

    • 5C5C5C@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      Astroturfing implies that a corporation or government agency with large amounts of funding are paying individuals or bots to spread misinformation for their employer’s financial or strategic benefit.

      You might not know this, but there isn’t a “Big Vegan” industry with deep pockets to financially support astroturfing. Agrobusinesses that grow vegetation make more money off the meat industry than they would if they centered their produce around vegetarian or vegan diets. Businesses that do cater to vegans barely manage to scrape by and have no margins to support social media manipulation; they barely even have budget for conventional marketing.

      What you’re actually witnessing is legitimate grassroots efforts to inform people about the harm that the meat industry causes. You see “astroturfing” doesn’t mean “a lot of people are saying things I don’t like”. It actually means “grassroots campaign but fake”, hence the name “astroturf”, which is a fake kind of grass.

    • TORFdot0@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      The fediverse is just hugely left-wing and with a lot of far-flung left wing posters to boot. It’s not an astroturf campaign just a place a lot of outsiders gather.

      I don’t know who would pay for this, there isn’t really any moneyed interest that would gain from turning public opinion against meat

    • ArmokGoB@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      Trolls that primarily are active on vegan communities learning they could troll here without the mods telling them to pack it up.

      • 5C5C5C@programming.dev
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        5 months ago

        TIL caring about issues that cause unimaginable degrees of unnecessary suffering and also threaten to end human civilization as we know it is trolling.