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Recently I've had a related observation while browsing a different website, which has an amount of bots and shills. But interestingly people seem to really despise it if you call a bot a bot, or a shill a shill. They might defend some obvious AI slop by saying "it's not a crime to write well" or "many people use em-dashes legitimately" or even just call you an idiot with no further explanation. All humanly written posts, all defending an obvious bot with vigor. I saw a similar thing on a local Facebook group, where an obvious paid shill posted a wall of text clearly written by ChatGPT, yet everybody just ate it up. It seems like when you bring up concerns, you end up as the bad guy for disturbing the peace, while the bot is the good guy because it's following the right conventions.
I remember a previous discussion about non-autistic vs autistic communication, where autistic communication is centered around an exchange of facts, while the core of non-autistic communication is emotional signalling. It seems that that this phenomenon extends to bad actors insofar as they can provide the right emotional cues to be accepted. Or at least people feel that it's not a disqualifying factor from engaging at face value. Meanwhile I know a shill is paid to say anything necessary in order to spread his message, and a bot is just a program with no emotions or sense of true or false.
But I think this touches on the idea of arguments as soldiers. To many people, it likely doesn't matter what the facts are, just the emotional message that they encode. And while debunkings exist, the practice they just act as another soldier from the other side knocking on the door.
Looping back into current events, it seems like there's little incentive for the administration not to bend the truth. The enemy was already deploying their rapid response arguments with zero regard for the truth, saying that a boneheaded ice agent just executed an innocent bystander on the street in cold blood. What good does it do to say "The agent made a split second judgement thinking he was grabbing a gun, which turned out to be the wrong call" (the truth) versus "an armed and violent individual resisted arrest and was shot while police were trying to disarm him" (not technically a lie). Twitter autists might try to go over the frame by frame, but for everyone else they're gonna live the lie.
Not sure which site you're vaguebooking about, but my experience on reddit is that most of the time someone gets called a bot or a shill, the accused is really an actual human who simply dared to deviate 0.01% from hivemind-approved window of opinions. I know this because I'm often the target of such accusations (I am neither a bot nor a shill), and because I've reviewed the comment history of many of those people who get dismissed this way, and rarely are there any obvious signs of them being anything but a human being with an organic opinion.
To be clear, there are bots on reddit, but they mostly seem to be karma farming, and not making detailed political arguments. They will typically (re)post generic oneliners on cat pictures and the like. And there are shills, like Kamala Harris reddit astro-turfing campaign, but it's not even clear they are paid, and rather just act based on their own righteousness.
So how do I know you're not doing the same thing? Dismissing people whose views you disagree with as being paid for or generated by a LLM? In particular, when you say:
Can you clarify how you determined that this person was getting paid to post that content? Did you see their paycheck?
And yes, people sometimes use ChatGPT to write arguments for them. I find that super obnoxious too, but mostly those are just losers who are too lazy or stupid to defend their own views. They're despicable, but they're not bots and they're not shills; they're just lazy morons.
But what I hate even more than those morons is the circlejerkers who avoid engaging in discussion and instead just label every outsider as a “bot” or “shill”, encouraging the rest to downvote rather than engage with their arguments intellectually. How do I know you aren't doing exactly that which I most despise?
That is a good point, but on the other hand I have seen 'reviews' left on websites, social media, and elsewhere which are full 5 star super enthusiasm over how great the product/service/movie/crawling abomination from the abyss is, where everyone else is giving much lower or even negative reviews, and where I have sampled the product/abomination myself and know it is not as good as claimed.
That's either a bot or someone being paid (pennies) to leave FIFTEEN THUMBS UP!!!! reviews to push the abomination up the SEO rankings. It's especially noticeable when you read a string of reviews all phrased almost identically, but even for individual cases you don't have to see the pay check to suspect the quality of the egg being laid, as it were.
Sure, I acknowledge that bots/shills exist; my point is that people are really bad at identifying them, and more likely to throw “bot” or “shill” out as insults or ways to dismiss an opponent, with little to no regard for the truth.
For product reviews, there is a clear incentive for the seller to prop up their listing with fake reviews, while legitimately happy customers often have little incentive to leave a review: if you buy a ream of printer paper, a set of kitchen towels or a box of pencils, how excited can you possibly be about your purchase? If the product is subpar, I could imagine leaving a negative review, as a form of revenge and a warning to others (I've done that myself). But for mundane products that basically meet expectations, you'd have to be exceedingly bored to leave a detailed 5 star review praising the subtle off-white coloring and the tasteful thickness of a sheet of printer paper. Consequently, I can imagine for those type of products, a relatively high fraction of rave reviews were left by shills.
For political discussions, the opposite is true. Lots of people like to waste their time online arguing about stuff that even politicians don't care that much about. These people are real humans. Take the presidential election, for example, where it was shown that Harris hired people (it's not clear if they were paid) to post positive stories on reddit in an attempt to generate buzz/get people to show up at the polls. Even knowing that that was a thing, I believe the majority of Harris supporters on reddit were genuine believers, not (un)paid shills.
This is based on the observation that reddit has millions of leftist users who would support Harris by default, versus only a handful of shills. That means the prior probability of any Harris-supporter being a paid shill is just very low, and I definitely wouldn't feel confident about identifying the shills. That can either mean I'm a terrible judge of character, or the people who confidently claim they can sniff out shills are just overconfident; the latter seems more plausible to me.
To give an example I saw today on reddit: this (re)post about Shell (the oil company) emitting orders of magnitude more CO2 than an average person has many people crying “shill”:
Someone reasonably replies to the last comment:
And yeah, I agree. These are just normal people deviating from the “oil company bad—upvotes to the left” playbook. I tried looking at the history of some of the top commenters and they seemed to have normal histories with no clear indication of paid shilling. That doesn't prove they aren't shilling, of course, but given that none of the shill-accusers give evidence to support their beliefs, I conclude that they were making those accussations baselessly.
I've seen this so many times now that I've come to believe that on reddit and spaces like it, words like “bot” and “shill” aren't used to identify actual bots or actual shills, but they are terms used to dismiss real people who express unwelcome opinions.
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My experience has been the exact opposite. The calls are about obvious giveaways in how the accused comments / writes the post and how all their replies are the exact same non-committal bullshit that LLMs are prone to generating.
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It sounded like hacker news to me, but I imagine other places could have the same behavior.
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See this is exactly what I'm talking about. Add "you're just dismissing someone you don't agree with" and "how do I know you can tell AI from human" to the list of insults people will throw at you when you call a bot a bot.
Now maaaybe you might have a point that normies can't tell me from those other people you hate. But they way your post is written it seems like you're accusing me of being a retard.
(to be clear, none of the stuff I mentioned is political at all.)
Please just answer the question. What method did you use to determine that the obvious paid shill was obviously paid to shill? That should be easy to answer since it was so obvious, right?
edit: instead of answering, phailyoor chose to block me. Cowardly behavior, that all but proves he has no reasonable answer, and my suspicions were correct all along.
You're not beating the allegations if you're not able to field any argument why I should treat you differently than the majority of people who accuse others of being bots and shills without evidence.
Your argument sounds indistinguishable from: “People seem to really despise you when you call a witch a witch. Whenever I call a woman a witch, there are people defending her by saying ‘that's just a woman with a slightly crooked nose’ when she's obviously the bride of Satan.”
Given that I know that most people who call women witches are full of shit, I'm not inclined to believe the women that you called witches were in fact witches, unless you can give me a solid argument why your ability to identify witches is so much more accurate than that of other witch hunters. And you can't just say “Yeah those other witch hunters were phonies, but I'm the real deal, trust me okay!” because that's what all those other witch hunters would say too.
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Yes, this is a good point. It's a strange recurrent piece of internet psychology that people have a real aversion to believing in organic disagreement. Normie comment sections are replete with improbable accusations of Russian or Chinese payrolling; and even 4chan has traditionally conducted arguments by asserting that all disagreeing posts are made by a single person (even when this is at odds with post cooldown timers) or more recently that they are organised by a Discord cabal targeting the thread. Maybe this is the modus tollens of the democratic feeling that numbers and diversity make right: if you are convinced a view is illegitimate, you conclude that it can't be espoused by a large and diverse set of people.
The problem is this: On the Internet, we don’t know if it’s organic disagreement or people in troll farms. Indeed, a lot of the really controversial stuff posted on X (Twitter) we know for a fact comes from a troll farm (a lot of that content trying to go viral is posted from India, Nigeria, or Southeast Asia, all three places with a lot of troll farms), since X lets us know the country someone posts from.
So, yes, it’s sometimes organic disagreement, but it’s sometimes troll farms.
It makes a lot more economical sense that troll farms would be active on a maximum-reach platform like Twitter, and is a lot more plausible that they would repost (possibly with minor alterations) shovel-loads of cookie-cutter "viral" content, than the idea that they would produce bespoke comments and engage with people in a complex way that requires solid command of English in comment sections and niche forums. However, these accusations are almost always flung in "close quarters" by people who are exasperated that someone specifically disagreed with something they said, not at faceless Twitter accounts retweeting Indian link farm pages into the void.
OK, let’s look at an example of something posted on X from a troll farm in Africa:
https://archive.ph/20260127123745/https://x.com/Chizitere_xyz/status/2015879947659645361
(I blocked them for being in a troll farm, and I could tell it was troll farm content just by looking at it)
Your impression?
Edit: Another troll farm post
https://archive.ph/20260128064238/https://x.com/meishato/status/2016321283693412834
(The notion that women do all of the domestic labor in partnerships is a myth; see this article and if you think IfStudies are too biased, this study shows that men do more work in partnerships when we take in to account paid labor)
Edit: The troll farms also post hot take replies to get engagement. See https://archive.ph/20260130134610/https://x.com/ohreallly170464/status/2016975167738491090
Yes, the poster is troll and, regardless whether he is made of flesh or bytes, he is effective troll because he effectively calls out internal contradictions in Current Year(TM) official world wiew.
"You say you believe in God. Word of God is clear that graven images are very, very bad. Why are churches full of golden and bejeweled statues and icons?"
"SHUT UP THIS TROLL!"
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Yeah, these are both Xwitter posts shouting copypasta into the void? The point I was making is that this sort of troll farm activity is expected and sensible; the person nitpicking your post in some local newspaper comment section being from a troll farm is not. However, the latter is the setting in which people like throwing around bot/troll farm accusations the most.
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