Dr. StrangeShill or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Do My Own Thinking

I wish I had a dollar for every time in the last 10 years here I have been called a shill. I even read my nick in an article listing shills on ATS. Alas no pay for me. I seriously doubt anyone pays people to try and influence public opinion through an internet bulletin board.

originally posted by: AreUKiddingMe
Sounds a lot like McCarthyism to me.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines McCarthyism as "the political practice of publicizing accusations of disloyalty or subversion with insufficient regard to evidence." link

Actually, "McCarthyism" is an interesting word to bring up.

McCarthy, though far from Mr. Perfect, was to some degree correct in his assessment of immense communist infiltration in our government. The Venona Project info, along with transcripts from his hearings (newly released) substantiate that many of the people McCarthy accused actually *were* involved in Soviet espionage.

Nevertheless, the communist sympathizers in media, academia, and government villified him. Granted, McCarthy's methods and personal behavior didn't exactly warm anybody over. But many of his detractors had a serious agenda to discredit him, and they succeeded so well that his name now has an "ism" attached to it.

Sorry, I don't mean to de-rail the thread. Just thought I'd throw that out there as it seemed tangentally relevant to the topic of "shills."

originally posted by: damwel
I wish I had a dollar for every time in the last 10 years here I have been called a shill. I even read my nick in an article listing shills on ATS. Alas no pay for me. I seriously doubt anyone pays people to try and influence public opinion through an internet bulletin board.

i'm not the smartest guy, but i can't follow your logic. you've been accused of being a shill, therefore paid opinion influencers don't exist? /shrug

anyway, here you go.

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.

firstlook.org...

a reply to: ATODASO

Content writers are actual people, doing actual jobs, like writing stories online magazines devoted to gaming, fashion or music, or drawing comics like The Oatmeal.

a reply to: 0zzymand0s

yep, most are.

some write content for comments sections and forums to promote a product or a viewpoint. it's right there in the job listings. doesn't pay all that well, either.

a reply to: ATODASO

Fair enough. I've never seen the ads. Still -- it feels unfair to use the words content creator for trolling web forums. It feels like calling a suicide bomber a "chemical engineer."

a reply to: 0zzymand0s

euphemisms are often used to soften or obliterate meaning.

a "massage parlor technician" by any other name...

lol