2 ms·

There's a lot of engagement on some issue or other, such as this one of how easy it is to spot paid shills and then while making a pretty reasonable point about

by harry8 7y ago

There's a lot of engagement on some issue or other, such as this one of how easy it is to spot paid shills and then while making a pretty reasonable point about it stating something very contentious as fact. Just like we see from Bernie and his total commitment to call communism by another name. And that last bit is 1% of the interest and is tangentially related so it doesn't totally jar. Look out for it. You get the same ones repeated again and again like that. It may be totally organic too because Assange is a narcisist rapist who is lying about being afraid of being extradited to the USA so lots of people have said so. Keep repeating and it becomes fact undermines anyone with a different point of view. Full disclosure I am not an Assange supporter nor a Bloomberg or Bernie supporter. Paid shills are actually really hard to spot. I strongly suspect most of what jars as paid shills aren't paid.

solinent 7y ago
Yeah I think you have to stem the tide to avoiding the "unpaid" shills. I've even seen people who shill in one direction just to be accepted by a community so they can troll them. I hypothesize you could detect this type of stuff using semantic analysis of text if you check word order and frequency (or go ML with fastText or w/e) you could get maybe 90% accuracy at determining whether someone isn't a shill. There needs to be an investigative process which humans undergo after this. Then some form of identification would be required before any sort of ban (ideally you tell them, this only stops the false positives from rejoining) can be lifted, just incase any local laws are broken. The shills all have some source material, so they should be closer to it language-wise than those that they teach/brainwash. But hey, I wish I was paid to shill against other shills and detect them, it would be an interesting job.

by harry8 7y ago

solinent 7y ago

Yeah I think you have to stem the tide to avoiding the "unpaid" shills. I've even seen people who shill in one direction just to be accepted by a community so they can troll them. I hypothesize you could detect this type of stuff using semantic analysis of text if you check word order and frequency (or go ML with fastText or w/e) you could get maybe 90% accuracy at determining whether someone isn't a shill. There needs to be an investigative process which humans undergo after this. Then some form of identification would be required before any sort of ban (ideally you tell them, this only stops the false positives from rejoining) can be lifted, just incase any local laws are broken. The shills all have some source material, so they should be closer to it language-wise than those that they teach/brainwash. But hey, I wish I was paid to shill against other shills and detect them, it would be an interesting job.