An anonymous person has claimed that the meat industry paid them and others to discredit veganism online.

The person revealed this information within an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) post – effectively a virtual, real-time Q-and-A – on Reddit at the end of November.

The anonymous person said that an unspecified US-based meat industry trade group paid them USD $17 per hour for a year to “go on sites” and “discredit veganism.”

They claimed that the meat industry group employed them and others to do this work for a year. They said that those hired for the work would make multiple accounts and “pretend to be vegans who had bad health outcomes,” or pretend to be vegans to “push the vegan subs to be more extreme and therefore easier to discredit.”

One of the most notable claims from the Q-and-A is that approximately “half the accounts on certain Reddit subs about this topic are not genuine.” The person said that the areas on which they focused included aiming to discredit veganism on nutritional grounds and arguing that some meat production is sustainable.

“We definitely cherry-picked data and made claims we knew were false,” wrote the person. “The crop deaths issue was a big one. We would embellish the heck out of that because there were no studies that could say one way or another how many mice are in a soy field, and most don’t think ‘oh wait, more crops are grown so we can feed animals.’”

The Reddit user claimed that those employed to discredit veganism online employed animal...

Read Full Story: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMifkFVX3lxTE1nUHhWVndZd1Q0eWdlbXVTZWEz...