Bloomberg bankrolls a social-media army

Re:Bloomberg bankrolls a social-media army by solinent on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @04:48PM (#22370436)

Paid shills tend to have a strange effect where they polarize people in the other direction than intended since their arguments are not always well founded and honest, and they will always suffer from some form of groupthink. It's a slingshot effect--at first people fall for the farce, but soon they realize they have been mislead. It could even spoil the election and get some to vote in the opposite direction.

I think it's also pretty easy to spot these days and we're armed much better to fight it at the platform-level.

I don't think this will end well for Bloomberg, he has a long way to climb, and his name is literally associated with big money. He may have already reached saturation, and this is a dying move.

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Re:Bloomberg bankrolls a social-media army by elihu on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @05:27PM (#22370776)

> Paid shills tend to have a strange effect where they polarize people in the other direction than intended since their arguments are not always well founded and honest, and they will always suffer from some form of groupthink.

Another aspect of this is that when one encounters a positive comment about Bloomberg on the Internet, the default assumption for a lot of people is going to be that Bloomberg slipped them a twenty. Even honest supporters of Bloomberg are going to have their statements viewed with extreme skepticism.

> I think it's also pretty easy to spot these days...

Is that really true? Some forms of astroturf are transparently obvious, but just because some of it is easy to spot doesn't mean it all is.

> I don't think this will end well for Bloomberg...

Same here. I'll take him seriously as a candidate once he's defended his ideas and his record in an adversarial setting (such as tonight's debate) and has won some delegates.

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Re:Bloomberg bankrolls a social-media army by harry8 on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @10:37PM (#22372492)

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.

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Re:Bloomberg bankrolls a social-media army by solinent on Thursday February 20, 2020 @09:47AM (#22375404)

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.

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