Summary: Dr. Richard Stallman on people who lie about him online (4 years after the older campaign of hate and distortion and half a decade before the current one, coordinated by groups funded by monopolies that dislike GPL)
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Roy: One thing I noticed quite a few years back is when I go online and people were mentioning your name there would always be some kind of troll or person throwing some anonymous insults directed at yourself. I've not seen it as much in recent years but it seems to be the case that there is almost a sort of a campaign and attack or smear campaign at the person, it seems to be very
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unfriendly towards certain interests in the industry.
RMS: It wouldn't surprise me if there were a paid campaign to do that because there have been like that aimed against others. Now I don't usually see any of that and I don't have any specific knowledge about who those people are, but it's not an absurd idea that it might have been organized.
Roy: Well, there was some
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bit of news not so long ago about the hiring of agents either to promote a product or to demonize people, or even in some cases demonize entire groups. This is done usually with a contract under a contractor or some kind of a proxy chain of people but in recent years it doesn't seem to be finding the same level of demonization on the web.
RMS: I'm glad. Ok. I'm not going to complain.