Because literally anything is a fact, when worded the right way. In fact, that's most of what is wrong with the state of our 'News' today. Even little word changes can be used to sway public opinion (ex: 'victim' vs 'drunk woman', in a case an assault victim happened to have been drinking).

I confess that I've also never really understood why people are so outraged by the hypothetical it likely presence of actual shills: it's not like the population of non-shill commenters doesn't already produce every stupid and inane take possible. Shills can shift the composition of votes and comments away from a given board's biases (towards their preferred biases), but what does that change from the perspective of you, the reader? Why would you engage differently with a terrible take from a paid shill and a terrible take from someone dumb enough to sincerely believe it? This seems especially the case on anonymous or pseudonymous fora, where you've already given up hope of leaning on known character as a prior (and IMO that's an excuse for skipping critical thought much of the time anyway).

I think you're overestimating how much people think critically about the news or discussions online. A couple upvoted comments here and there, paid for by a massive corporation, can absolutely influence opinion.

I don't want to sound like I think some "smart" people are somehow immune to this - I think everyone, regardless of their education or intelligence, is susceptible to this kind of group-think.

It seems almost definitional to me that you'd have to be pretty dumb to fall into this trap, but I'm probably being lazy with my terminology, and "bad at thinking" might be a better description than "dumb" (ie, critical thinking is a learnable skill, if you're smart enough).

It's still not clear to me that I see why shills are such a cause for outrage, at least at a personal level: if a person's critical thinking abilities are impaired enough of people that they'd have their views appreciably changed by shills' voting patterns, the absence of shills just means they'd be blindly following the whims of online mobs. I can see how this is better, but just _barely_.

OTOH, for those who are capable of basic critical thinking, shills don't seem to have much power: if they make good points, then good, if they don't, then no harm done.

I just don't see how why bad comments are somehow worse when they're driven by payments instead of simply the stupidity of a normal person.

Critical thinking is one thing, but that's not always or even usually the point of such campaigns. It can be as simple as 'bandwagon effect', which regardless of how silly it is to believe people behave that way, they absolutely do. Few people want to be on the unpopular side of an opinion.

> Few people want to be on the unpopular side of an opinion.

I can't relate to this impulse even a little bit, but believe that it's common. That being said, I don't see how its ubiquity makes it any less a failure of critical thinking ability.

The Internet is a pretty hostile environment for those whose epistemology depends on who's behind the pseudonym: it's not clear to me that shills are going to make these people much worse at thinking and processing information than they already are.

The same goes for those who do have appreciable critical thinking abilities: you shouldn't be credulously consuming the thoughts of any random pseudonym, and the same skeptical habits that inoculate you against dumb ideas from unpaid strangers work roughly as well on shills.

Yeah, I notice this every time there's a story about Facebook or Google, there's always a group of posts that are exclaiming how great their life is since they deleted their account.

It's super creepy

> This is the lazy and ignorant method of dismissing other people's arguments.

First, please observe the principle of charity when posting.

> Shill or not, what does it matter if what they state are facts?

Because it is entirely possible to tell large lies using small facts.

Because propaganda and disinformation are actual, real things and are very difficult to combat once unleashed in the commons.

Because the "let the marketplace of ideas figure it out" excuse to not police propaganda and disinformation attacks is hopelessly naive at best, and deliberately ineffective at worst.