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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?
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.
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