This piece evokes in me vacillating layers of frustration, amusement, and admiration.
The whistleblower has chosen to stay anonymous and says they signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement, so they can’t reveal the company’s name. This means there’s no way to to independently verify whether the story is true.
The whistleblower themselves reminded readers:
“You don’t know if I’m telling the truth. That’s part of my point. Be skeptical of everything online and consider sources. Are they credible? You have every right to be skeptical of me. If you are skeptical of me, and others, then I have done my service in making people smarter and better protected from scams and frauds.”
I have my suspicions that this was well-crafted agitprop by one or more clever vegans, but I’ll never really know. I’d think that the work would have been farmed out to somewhere for less pay. But online disinformation campaigns absolutely are real, and the tactics they claim were used sound very in-line with corporate disinformation tactics, and we’ve all heard them used before. It’s some of the same tactics that carnists will use without anyone paying them, because they have their own intrinsic motivations to disparage veganism.
In the end it doesn’t much matter whether the story is true because it may as well be true. It went viral on a vegan blog and not some corporate media body with a reputation to protect (though honestly their reputations are already shot).
This piece evokes in me vacillating layers of frustration, amusement, and admiration.
I have my suspicions that this was well-crafted agitprop by one or more clever vegans, but I’ll never really know. I’d think that the work would have been farmed out to somewhere for less pay. But online disinformation campaigns absolutely are real, and the tactics they claim were used sound very in-line with corporate disinformation tactics, and we’ve all heard them used before. It’s some of the same tactics that carnists will use without anyone paying them, because they have their own intrinsic motivations to disparage veganism.
In the end it doesn’t much matter whether the story is true because it may as well be true. It went viral on a vegan blog and not some corporate media body with a reputation to protect (though honestly their reputations are already shot).