I hear conspiracy theorizing-types talk about how many shills there are online leaving comments and it just got me curious if there's any rational/evidence-based reason for thinking that this is really a thing? What makes people so confident they are dealing with "shills" and not just people who disagree with them? These views are fringe and controversial after all so I don't see why it couldn't just be normal and expected pushback...
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You could check miscellaneous groups/communities that direct shills activity in social media - different "climate activists", "LGBTXYZ+ supporters", "NAFO", "ADL" and so on. It's pretty easy. You will find a tons of direct orders - "here is a poll, we should wreck it", "this should be downvoted" and so on. Then just observe how shills fulfill their orders.
As for occasional encounters, shills are easy to detect too - they can't support normal conversations, never answer simple and reasonable questions in dialogues and do not show any ability to provide apropriate reasoning arguments.
When you talk with a normal user, you have a nice natural human conversation and see logical reasoning and clarifying of the opponent points as needed, his own thoughts and so on. You could disagree with him, but you can't deny his authentic thinking. With a shill you see just a stream of patterns and full spectre of conversation tricks to keep his stream of patterns flowing.
Unnatural conversation is what reveal shill in the person. Simple as that.