Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, has recently broken its winning trial record with a number of jury verdicts against it.

Bayer’s Monsanto was ordered to pay more than $1.5 billion Friday over claims its patented weed-killer, Roundup, was linked to users’ cancer, Bloomberg reported.

James Draeger, Valerie Gunther and Dan Anderson were each awarded a total of $61.1 million in actual damages and $500 million each in punitive damages by jurors in state court in Jefferson City, Missouri.

The three people alleged that their non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas — a type of cancer that begins in your lymphatic system, part of the body’s immune system — were caused by years of using Roundup while gardening.

  • lennybird@lemmy.worldEnglish
    64·
    11 months ago

    I’ll never forget the weird fucking sub of literal Monsanto apologists on reddit who’d keyword search for anything negative and descend with gish-gallop and brigading.

    Bunch of weirdos, some of whom openly admitted to working for and depending on Bayer/Monsanto for a living.

      • extant@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13·
        11 months ago

        More than likely it’s a bot farm hired by a public relations firm. Bot farms create bots every day and then assign them tasks to repost popular content and then reply using popular comments under different bots all so they can build up credibility and look like a real user. So then when they are put to a task you can have a single user welding the influence of hundreds or thousands to control the narrative.

        Reddit is famously saturated in those bots and this place is likely no different but on a smaller scale made even easier by the instance system.

        • lennybird@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          11 months ago

          It was proven in court docs if I recall that they did have a troll farm not unlike the Russian IRA with the sole purpose of defending Monsanto’s products with vigor. The only type of person who would engage in that degree of fundamentalist day in and day out is either an AI bot or on a payroll to do exactly that.

    • PanaX@lemmy.world
      17·
      11 months ago

      As a mod on a few garden and science subs at that time, they were pernacious and ethically inept. They would associate anything anti-pesticide or GMO with being an anti science quack. And they would dog pile on poor individuals expressing concern.

      I had several debates with them, often reported them for brigading, and ultimately had to ban them.

      • aidan@lemmy.world
        3·
        11 months ago

        Being anti-GMO is almost always anti-science quack. (Except if your complaint is about the patenting of the DNA) Pesticides are a bit more complicated because they are necessary for modern agriculture, but of course making a poison that only kills the things you want to kill has the risk if them killing more things.

    • broadacre_farmer@lemmy.world
      10·
      11 months ago

      Bunch of weirdos, some of whom openly admitted to working for and depending on Bayer/Monsanto for a living.

      Society relies on products they’ve developed, the world would be a very different place without gramoxone, 2,4-D and glyphosate. Considering glyphosate is the safest of the widely used herbicides it’s probably not a great thing to brand everyone who is against banning it a shill.