Channel 4 News
1 HN recommender · recommended in 7 months, 2021–2025
8:52 · 243K views · Jun 30, 2021
Channel 4 News reports on undercover Greenpeace footage of an ExxonMobil lobbyist describing efforts to weaken climate legislation. Exxon disputes the claims.
Cited as a source on oil industry lobbying and disinformation in climate policy threads.
7 comments from Hacker News
Here are direct links to the "caught on camera" videos with ExxonMobil lobbyists: [LINK] [10 mins] this video [9 mins] I found these to be a fascinating glimpse behind the scene of "political debate" about environmental issues...
Advertisements have been proven countless times to be a form of psychological manipulation, and a very potent one that works very well. After all, if it didn't work we wouldn't be seeing ads crop up literally every-fucking-where, including these days even in our very own night sky in the form of drone lightshows. The ad companies have huge teams of mental health experts in order to maximize the reach & impact of their advertisements on the general populace. Ads are so powerful that they've even managed to twist the truth about plenty of horrific shit happening to the point of affecting the health and safety of real people, sometimes literally on a global scale. Chiquita bananas, De Beers, Nestle, Oil & Gas companies, and must I remind you of Tobacco companies (and surprise surprise, the same people who were doing the ads for Big Tobacco are the ones doing ad campaigns for O&G companies now)? There have been SO MANY examples from all these companies of using advertisements to trick and manipulate people & politicians, oftentimes just straight up lying , like the Tobacco companies lying about the adverse health effects despite knowing for decades what the adverse health effects were , Or Oil & Gas companies lying about climate change via comprehensive astroturfing & advertisement campaigns [1]. This all barely scratches the surface, too, especially these days where you have platforms like Google and Meta enabling genocides, mass political interference and pushing things like cr
I wrote a lot, which believe it or not I try not to do, so to summarize I'll just say this: your argument, essentially, is that given a stat like "Black Americans represent 12.7% of Americans, but make up between 30-40% of police killings", the people causing the problem are the ones saying it's unacceptable, not those responsible for a system that kills ~3x more Black Americans than White Americans. I find that to be absurd. --- > identity has become a hugely popular issue on the American left in the last decade I know we're sparring on this in another thread, but it really gets to me when people dismiss the concerns of Black Americans, LGBTQ Americans, Women, Native Americans, etc. as "identity" issues. It's undeniable that people in these groups have an entirely different, objectively worse experience than straight cis White men. My arguments here are slavery, forced incarceration and sterilization, and genocide, to say nothing of ongoing discrimination and prejudice and institutional problems today. This country hasn't been dealing with "identity" for a decade, it's been dealing with it from before the time its 1st president was a slaver. The idea that this has only been a problem roughly since Obama was president is... the nicest thing I can say here is naive. > Moreover, many people (myself included) think that this identity politics stuff is tearing at our social fabric, not only by fostering racial divides, but also because Americans of all stripes are losing trust in
What I am saying is that I have seen a lot of evidence for organized/professional sentiment manipulation in 4chan, and there are tons of collected threads that describe how the organizations that are paid to post in 4chan work. I assume it is a professional service being sold. For example, every time I tried to make threads around this YouTube video exposing the lobbying practices of Exxon Mobile against climate change fighting measures, my thread would get derailed into racist stuff that had nothing to do with the video and would get the thread eventually locked. this video
They actively corrupt democratic governments and disseminate misinformation in order to keep making money by destroying the planet. Exxon infamously supports cap and trade because they know it's politically non-viable [1]. Confident no consumer is asking them to do this. [1]: this video