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.

  • extant@lemmy.worldEnglish
    122·
    1 year 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
      31·
      1 year 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.