Maybe I need to be educated on the nuances but why would anyone believe what a spokesperson says about a company/product/service?
It could be like ‘X employees being forced to have neural chips implanted as a condition of employment’ and a spokesperson would say something like ‘Mr. Musk believes this would absolutely increase productivity and employee satisfaction by providing us with the most important data on how our employees conduct their day to day business both at home and in the office. He has the full support of X employees and is not concerned about their brains being fried, as some slandering individuals would have you believe is happening’.
Does it really come down to gullibility or am I missing something?
I’d say there are more people willing to call bullshit on a spokesperson for a large company than to believe them. There are people who are good at calling out bullshit, and people who aren’t, but I think that only comes into play if there truly is a mind-numbingly, obviously nefarious goal such as the example you’ve given; at the end of the day, it comes down to what you want to believe and where you place your trust. You use X as an example, a company in which you clearly have no trust (wise). But, if a company you believed to have a clean track record and whose products you trusted made statements about their product, then you’d be more inclined to take it at face value than to look into it more. Furthermore, just because someone is trying to sell to you doesn’t mean they have to lie to you to do it, choosing to believe their pitch should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
And if people see two statements that are that contradictory, yet refuse to research the matter and just believe what they hear?
Then yeah, they’re just gullible.
They hire people who are good at talking to gullible people. This is basically the plot of Thank You for Smoking.
