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Are shills misinformation adjacent in some way? It's interesting to see activists listed as potential shills, though they don't clearly explain the body of evid
by kodah 3y ago
Are shills misinformation adjacent in some way? It's interesting to see activists listed as potential shills, though they don't clearly explain the body of evidence that aligns activists as potentially harmful. An activist can be a shill but I'm not sold that they're all bad, but I've definitely run into a good number of activists who border so far on not knowing what they're talking about or how to talk about it that they're essentially harmful to either information quality or discourse among regular people.
- at_a_remove 3y agoShills are absolutely misinformation because they distort the weighting. If I am one guy and I complain about the font used in the question mark under the help menu, I am just one guy. If I spawn or buy or suborn a thousand accounts to complain about it, my message is amplified and can distort priorities, pass thresholds, and so forth. Shills can downvote something out of being seen at all, even on here unless you turn on "showdead." It's basically the commodification of a Sybil attack.
- uLogMicheal 3y agoor even passive bots that run sentiment analysis and attach votes to what they favor...
- uLogMicheal 3y agoIt was odd to me that government actors seemed to not be a mention in this study. Maybe they fall under the activist category?
- obviouslynotme 3y agoIt is funded by the US Government. The only shills it will find are Russian, maybe the Chinese these days, the politically unpopular, and social media marketers.