General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Was DU also inundated with Fake Russian bots and Fake news during elections? [View all]Turn CO Blue
(4,221 posts)Shills are paid humans with multiple accounts and personas, who have training to influence opinion, and occasionally disrupt. There are software programs that they can use to help them keep their personas straight, but the real human writes the posts or responses for the most part (although they will have some boilerplate talking points of the day from their employer that they can cut/paste into supposedly spontaneous responses). There are thousands of shills for high-end consumer electronics, and almost every political campaign and lobbying group hires at least a few shills. The fracking industry has hundreds and hundreds of shills. Just post anything on an environmental page on FB, and the fracking shills will come out of the woodwork.
Bots are software programs designed to mimic humans in a host of accounts, and in terms of influence campaigns, will perform their posting or retweeting automatically, and have very automated posts or responses. For example, you will see a bot network post the same thing, with very few differences, on Twitter all timed to appear that the tweet was so great that there was a domino effect.
Not all bots are about politics or influencing. We had many bot programs in the airline industry that would work through queues automatically (for instance, perform the 1000 command entries needed for seat assignments when the aircraft had to be swapped out).
There are better software programs every day to identify the accounts in bot networks (no matter how convincingly-human the bots are becoming), but I think the paid shills are far more influential, and therefore more unethical.
There has been a movement among communications and public relations professional organizations to prohibit brands, firms and political strategists from membership that use shills as a violation of their code of ethics.