Looks Like Samsung Has Built An Army Devoted To Making Apple Look Bad Online

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Samsung-Headquarters

Apple and Samsung aren’t on the best of terms. Since Apple won a $1 billion patent lawsuit against Samsung in U.S. court last year, the two have been at each other’s throats in the media. Samsung’s Galaxy TV ads depict Apple customers as mindless sheep. Apple’s Phil Schiller recently went on the offensive against Samsung on the eve of the S4 announcement. The two are clearly at odds.

Would Samsung result to bashing Apple in online article comments? It appears so. In fact, the Korean company may have its own army dedicated to trolling the comments sections of blog posts.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt is a great writer who covers Apple over at Fortune Tech’s Apple 2.0 column for CNNMoney. Over the weekend, he wrote an article examining the possibility that Samsung is in the midst of a full-blown PR campaign hellbent on defaming Apple. One of his main points was that Samsung recently admitted to paying Taiwanese students to bash HTC phones online. Reports of the same activity have also popped up in other parts of the world. It looks very similar to how China was paying celerities to slam Apple on social networks.

Now Samsung may be deploying its army of commenters in the United States. DeWitt’s article received 300+ comments in 24 hours. He explained the reaction in a follow-up post:

The post drew more that the usual number of comments. Twenty six hours later, we’re up to 343 messages and counting. Some readers supported the thesis. Some ridiculed it. Some attacked Apple. Some attacked me.

That kind of thing comes with the territory, although not usually in such numbers or with such vehemence. But what happened at about 2 a.m. EST — Sunday afternoon in Seoul, South Korea — was new.

In the space of a few hours, more than a thousand votes were cast on the DISQUS feedback system, voting down any comment remotely anti-Samsung and voting up anything — no matter how inane, in-artful or wrong — that disparaged Apple, the thesis, or me.

Read his whole post (including some of the comments) and decide for yourself.

If Apple resorts to this kind of activity, then it’s time to sell your stock.

Source: Fortune Tech

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