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thank u cows for the milk 😋

And now we’re doing it to the almonds smh

Most likely more people being aware of it, and then people seeing those posts doing well leads to more posts like that

Arguably, you should be moreso concerned about the opposite. The industry runs well known astroturfing campaigns:

NCBA [National Cattlemen’s Beef Association] calls it “proactive reputation management”: a strategy that entails monitoring the internet for messaging opportunities, then leaping in to burnish beef’s image whenever it’s advantageous

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/03/beef-industry-public-relations-messaging-machine

The meat industry has helped fund research and communications initiatives to minimize its links to climate change. And it has organized astroturf attacks on initiatives like EAT-Lancet

https://newrepublic.com/article/177575/never-trust-green-meat

Astroturfing implies that a corporation or government agency with large amounts of funding are paying individuals or bots to spread misinformation for their employer's financial or strategic benefit.

You might not know this, but there isn't a "Big Vegan" industry with deep pockets to financially support astroturfing. Agrobusinesses that grow vegetation make more money off the meat industry than they would if they centered their produce around vegetarian or vegan diets. Businesses that do cater to vegans barely manage to scrape by and have no margins to support social media manipulation; they barely even have budget for conventional marketing.

What you're actually witnessing is legitimate grassroots efforts to inform people about the harm that the meat industry causes. You see "astroturfing" doesn't mean "a lot of people are saying things I don't like". It actually means "grassroots campaign but fake", hence the name "astroturf", which is a fake kind of grass.

Today I learned people sharing their opinions is "astroturfing"

The fediverse is just hugely left-wing and with a lot of far-flung left wing posters to boot. It’s not an astroturf campaign just a place a lot of outsiders gather.

I don’t know who would pay for this, there isn’t really any moneyed interest that would gain from turning public opinion against meat

You don't have to be vegan to agree that animal farming of the 21st century is cruel and we could do better than that

""Yes""

When the staunchly leftist community has more vegan users then average (who would've guessed???)

What an absolutely bizarre whataboutism, so vapid and self-evidently disingenuous that I can't believe I'm about to waste my time picking it apart, but here we go:

First of all, rescuing children from traumatically abusive environments is not the same as what the meat industry does to calves. Separation from parents is inherently traumatic itself, but that needs to be weighed against the degree of harm that the abusive parent might do, on a case-by-case basis.

Secondly, there are certainly cases of the government separating children from their parents that should be protested. Like when Texas defines transgender-affirming households to be committing child abuse and uses that as a reason to forcibly separate the child. Or when immigration control separates migrant children from their parents.

This might come as a shock to you, but it's possible to care about and advocate for more than one issue at a time. I don't know if your emotional capacity might be limited to just caring about one thing, but most people don't suffer from that limitation.

What a braindead argument. Sometimes bad things happen to human children so we can excuse animal cruelty on an industrial scale.

And it's not just the separation, 99% of male calves are killed immediately after being born, while females are either filled with hormones so they can be grown for meat, or they are raped year after year so they keep producing milk.

Not living with biological parents is different than being seperated, living alone in small veal cages, and ultimately being killed as a child for veal as happens for male calves

We also do not intentionally seperate all child from their parents regardless of circumstances. Maybe a tiny amount from child protective services for abusive parents, but it's not like the dairy industry is doing so because of abusive cow parents