Battling the Internet Water Army: Detection of Hidden Paid Posters

People say shills don't exist, well here is an actual paper about such people who clearly do exist and get paid to post online.

"In this paper, we focus on paid posters who post comments
online to influence people’s thoughts regarding popular social
events. We characterize the basic organization structure of paid
posters as well as their online posting patterns. To the best
of our knowledge, this paper is the first to study the social
phenomenon of paid posters."

There's even a mathematical model of detecting such posters.

Absolutely...yet those who are accused of being so aren't really the ones who are shilling. Go figure.

The Internet Water Army makes my cat ANGRY!

There's 2 types of shills, those who simply do it for monetary interests of their employers (like the WoW example given by the paper) and those who do it to confuse the public and misinform them or try to disrupt the exchange of certain information.

oh; fact is, we ALL have an agenda.



Shills might come here to do x,y,& z, but so do we, :)

in china perhaps (but thats all)

it is merely a limited capacity of those (OP kind), to not allow other opinions, whatever bizzare they can be
-> in this sense, they are making new and new enemies (only thanks to this untolerant approach)

Geez there are some naive people around. Never mind plugging products. The intelligence services watch all the forums. They have their own shills, who's remit is to misdirect anyone getting anywhere near protected knowledge. This site is full of 'em. Basically any poster of passages from the bible is a shill, Anyone cutting and pasting to make long posts makes the reader lose interest and is a shill. Anyone playing down the issue being discussed is a shill.

Never had any trouble discerning real information from false information before, but the vast majority are not able to do so. There's also the various logical fallacies and debating techniques that they use in order to disrupt and change discussions. Just the act of causing a flame war or distracting from the topic at hand is enough for them to consider a job well done because of the implications it has for the post. But these people are not paid to think so if you have any intelligence and rationale and logical thinking skills then you should have no trouble discerning.

However these forums are full of the mentally ill and dissociative people who are not in touch with reality and are highly susceptible to manipulation via information.

I don't understand your use of the word remit in that sentence at all... There is no "hidden" knowledge, information is free and all around us, shills merely serve to confuse people as to whether the information is real and part of reality or not. They know they cannot hide information, it will always get out, they can only make people doubt the credibility of the information presented. Or if that fails the person presenting the information.

I don't know if you were being sarcastic in that last part but people here seem to believe that a shill is someone who does not agree with their demented beliefs.

Last Edited by Plasmare on 12/21/2011 03:25 AM

All posters need to be aware that forums are not a place for free speech they are aiding counter-intelligence in their job.

When two competitive companies hire paid posters to post fake news or negative comments about each other, normal online users may feel overwhelmed and find it difficult to put any trust in the information they acquire from the Internet.

Funny how this term is now so common and yet was already known and used 7 years ago.

People actually click on those?