If the blog opposed Fox, their employees would counter. If the blog was neutral, the Fox employees would counter. If there were comments critical of Fox in the comment section, Fox employees would respond. They did not identify themselves as employees. I call them shills, though articles ID them as sock puppets.
[QUOTE=Paul Krugman]
In general, if your reaction to some comments is that nobody could really be that stupid, it may be that you are just underestimating the power of stupidity — but it may also be that nobody is, in fact, that stupid, but that someone has been employed to play stupid for fun and profit.
[/QUOTE]
Since this is not the pit, we probably shouldn’t name names. I’m wondering though whether The Powers That Be and The Posters That Be believe that some of those banned here have been professionals (other than obvious spammers). Also, if Murdoch hired such clowns, there’s reason to suspect that others did as well.
I characterize such behavior as deceitful and dishonorable: their employers can be described similarly. My condemnation scales with the scope of the activities.
Wow. I have never been a defender of Fox News, but this OP is just paranoia. Even if a passing shill rolls through, I kinda doubt it’s much to worry about.
It absolutely happens, all over the net. Some of the more subtle ones probably manage to sneak under the radar here once in a while.
I don’t know which news organizations bash each other, but it’s a pretty fair bet that a lot of that goes on. It’s also a pretty fair bet that there are a lot of republicans spewing anti-democrat rants on blogs and vice-versa.
And it doesn’t end there. You’ve got an entire army of viral marketers prowling the net. Some of them are obvious spammers. Others, not so much. If say you’ve got a zombie movie coming out, some of them may just make a bunch of zombie related posts in blogs with no mention at all of the movie just to build a general interest in zombies. That guy who just posted a link to the latest cool youtube video may just be trying to get hits for that video. You never know. Sometimes they even do tag team posts. One guy will come along and post a question and the other guy will come along and “just happens” to know the perfect product to solve his problem.
You also see a lot of it in product reviews, so much so that I pretty much completely ignore all of the glowing positive product reviews since I just assume they are all written by company shills.
ETA: To explicitly answer the OP, yes, I am pretty much 100 percent certain that shills have managed to post here and at least a few of them haven’t been caught (yet).
As I said before, I think this is just paranoia. However, everybody should watch Shepard Smith and the brand new FOX News Deck, where Fox can give you the News You Need to start your morning. Tune it at 11 AM (8 AM Pacific time).
From the link: On the blogs, the fight was particularly fierce. Fox PR staffers were expected to counter not just negative and even neutral blog postings but the anti-Fox comments beneath them. One former staffer recalled using twenty different aliases to post pro-Fox rants. Another had one hundred. Several employees had to acquire a cell phone thumb drive to provide a wireless broadband connection that could not be traced back to a Fox News or News Corp account. Another used an AOL dial-up connection, even in the age of widespread broadband access, on the rationale it would be harder to pinpoint its origins. Old laptops were distributed for these cyber operations. Even blogs with minor followings were reviewed to ensure no claim went unchecked. I think my questions were reasonable, given this revelation. It’s hardly an emergency though: we simply evaluate claims, lay the smack down where appropriate, and hope that the shills aren’t tenacious.
There was a short-lived fellow who posted pro-Red China missives without much interaction with posters here. I’m guessing he was a shill due to his reluctance to defend his own arguments and engage. Or maybe I just had a sixth sense…
ETA: Plenty of viral marketing: the illucidd dreaminggg guys did this every few months for a while.
Measure for Measure, I’m sorry for making light; you do have an interesting question here about shills. It’s just that I might be a bit more cynical than you. I have absolutely zero doubt that we have already had all stripes of shills here. They show up all the time, but a Fox News shill… well, let’s just say I wouldn’t want his job if it entails selling the board on Fox News.
Not because I don’t believe this is possible, but because the OP seems to believe that this must be true because EVIL FOX NEWS employs tactics that no other “news” organization would use. No, MSNBC or CNN or any other news corp. would do this. Why? Because every other news station other than FOX is ethical, above board, and would never stoop to such tactics.
Measure for Measure, I hate to tell you this, bit shills are used EVERYWHERE when shaping or changing opinion is being attempted.
Ever listen to a radio program during election season? Guess who the callers are? almost exclusively, they are employed (or are volunteers) by both candidates to sell their candidate and/or party platform to the listeners. Everyone has an agenda.
I don’t think it is as wide spread as you might think for something like a news organization, though. FOX, like MSNBC, CNN, etc. employ people to scour the internet to gauge public perception, but to think that FOX or any other organization would hire a shill to rant on a blog is a bit much. Not because they would be above doing it, but because
there are enough people out there on both sides (or all sides) of the political spectrum, that someone would probably be an advocate for their “side” for free. Being right, and more importantly, telling others why they are wrong, is something people live for.
Blogs aren’t exactly a good place to concentrate any resources of this type, because the audience for the blogs are often limited. Why waste valuable time and energy and money on a blog, when one of your fans will do it for free?
Although I wouldn’t rule out a shill or two being on a site like this one, I don’t see any benefit. People on this board aren’t usually changing their minds about anything they have already formed an opinion on, so there is little or no “bang for the buck”, so to speak.
So, chalk me up in the “paranoia” camp. It’s certainly not something to get into a twist about.
I am curious, though. If this wasn’t reported about FOX News, would you have posted about it at all?
blindboyard, a computer program that makes socks isn’t even the least remarkable. There are thousands of 15 year old kids that can create a piece of software to do the same thing. Also, are you familiar with The Guardian? You probably shouldn’t get your news from them, much less a site that cites them second hand. It’s kinda like saying “but a friend of mine read it in The National Enquirer”
I need to take back what I just said about The Guardian. I was mistaking them for one of a number of British tabloids, but I was wrong. They actually do pretty decent journalism. However, I still stand by the first part of my post. “Persona Management Software” is not remarkable in the least. There are radio commercials in my area that promise to “improve your online persona” if you just call them. These companies will create socks for you even if all your business does is paint houses.
I can’t remember what show I was watching but they were doing a piece on campaign workers and recruiters, one of the things they did was have a class on how to troll various types of internet sites. Mostly ones that ran polls. They would tell them to log on and disagree with ANYTHING that wasn’t in their party’s interest.
It didn’t matter if they actually agreed with what they were being polled on,just do your best to skew the results.
And the eventual escelation is calling anyone that supports anything a schill, and as a lessening of the evaluation, a victim of propaganda.
Speaking of propaganda, Hillary seems to be using the McDonald’s slogan tactic of using the subtle “I’m eating it/ voting for Hillary” as though the audience members own mind is generating the thought. Omg I’m not a republican shill, I’m sick of both parties.
In order to collect a paycheck from NewsCorp[sup]TM[/sup], you have to be more subtle in your disdain for Fox News. Less SDMB and more Shep Smith, who you can watch at 11 AM (8 AM Pacific time). You really should check out the New Fox News Deck. It’s awesome. Shep will bring you The News You Need to start your day.