alt Hacker NewsShills don't need anonymity. They can troll and astroturf just fine under their real names, or the names of the people they're paying to shill for them, because there is no one who comes in the night to put a bag over your head for shilling for the establishment.
The people who need anonymity are the people who would be punished for saying things people in power don't like.
Replies
vga1 • today at 7:34 AM
With anonymity, they can 1000000x their presence and thus the effectiviness of their message.
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dgellow • today at 10:26 AM
The astroturfing relies mostly on anonymous users. The vast majority of trolling and shilling on Twitter and similar platforms is done with fake identities. So you have a few open shills who are using their real names, with massive campaigns enabled by anonymous/fake users
Shilling by nation-level actors often involves paying South Asians or Africans to create profiles claiming to be an ordinary person from somewhere completely different. Or people in said countries may not even be paid by a geostrategic rival but are shilling because they identified profit potential in e.g. selling MAGA merchandise. Obvious what they do depends on pseudonymity, and would fall apart if their real names were shown.