Good points. But the task of shill is a fundamentally malicious, deceiving one: it requires one to lie constantly in order to unseemingly sell something that nobody wants to buy. In this sense, I find it hard to believe that this task can be taken upon by people out of the loop who spontaneously decide to pollute free speech, doing it by the books as if they were trained for it.Farcevalue wrote:There could be a lot of gray in this area. We had Bush saying, "Let us on tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories." We have Cass Sunstein and Bill Clinton wanting to censor conspiracy theories (How day-yuhr yew!) All this is very public and acceptable to the MSM, it's not hard to imagine a cadre of disinformation artists doing the work of the dear leaders out of sincere, however misguided, belief. They may not be "in the loop" but may shill for the powerz out of a sense of duty to thwart the evil conspiracy theorists. And of course there are those who either truly believe, or more likely IMO, know but by vehemently denying, can refrain from admitting they know. And of course like you said, those under omerta, real insiders who are doing it knowingly as part of the dark secret who will never reveal themselves. It's the rank and file that surprise me. Like Richard Pryor on cheating: "You gonna believe me or your lyin' eyes?"
I remember reading of zionists from different countries who, out of a sense of allegiance to Israel, in their free time join groups that try to steer and hijack online discussions, to promote pro-israel issues (there was a link posted on the forum about this a while back); but even these are not really shills (they are just bad citizens of their own countries, at most): What they do they do it directly (only not spontaneously, but upon a call from their group), they are not instructed to pretend to be of the opposite mind, they are not trained in confusion techniques, trolling techniques etc.
Those who do that, I think someone trains them and supervises them in order to make sure they will not back out of it and "squeal"...