The influence of fake news mills is overstated by corporate news media who benefit by attempting to legitimize their own reporting. Russian collusion turned out to be a few hundred thousand dollars worth of Facebook ads. Bloomberg spent more than 900 million dollars and couldn't sway the election, yet we're supposed to believe that some fake news stories on Facebook got Trump elected.
I feel that this paranoia of bots has become a modern Red Scare. It becomes impossible online to express certain unpopular opinions without being instantly labeled a bot or shill no matter how well backed your argument is. In fact I've seen people comment that "you should be afraid of the smart ones" when it comes to bots. It seems that "bots" have simply become an intellectual cop-out for most. On the other hand, I can find plenty of accounts on Reddit that post endlessly with the same (popular) political agenda using shoddy sources (think screenshots of headlines) that are invariably highly upvoted. Despite this, you will not find accusations of shilling towards these accounts.
We know that those accounts exist, and that they were created and deployed by numerous governments when opportunity struck. We can see their activity: what countries they came from, what they were saying, and what hashtags they made up. My understanding of the data is that they were pervasive and influencial in the 2016 US President Elections and in many other socially sensitive events such as the protests in Hong Kong. So I dont think the word paranoia is really fair. It's a real, known problem. (Edit: and now there's evidence[1] that they are spreading climate denialism as well).
Anyone calling someone a bot when they are clearly not a bot is probably just being intellectually lazy, dishonest, or arguing in bad faith. But that's just another flavor of the issues with political (or any rational) discourse we had already. If it weren't bots, it would be something else.
And yes, shilling (and failure to recognize shilling) is endemic on that platform. One of the many reasons I try to stay away from it now.
