Talking your book means you are a spruiker or common shill.
No, a shill is someone who is paid to entice people to take a position that may be contrary to what the shill believe, so that the shill's master benefits.
Adam Back at Blockstream employs a large team of PR people to "correct misinformation" about large blocks. These people are shills because they are paid to promote a position that they may not believe in, a position that is hurtful for BTC (high fees / unreliable confirms), but one that benefits the employer Blockstream (by creating demand for their layer-2 solutions).
When you say things like this you sound much more like a conspiracy theorist than a scientist. It weakens trust further in your position.
This is public information. Of course they don't call their social media outreach team "shills" -- they call them the social media community outreach team, or something like that. Remember brg444? He was one of their employees working to raise segwit support, and was let go after segwit was activated.
Do you really believe that Blockstream doesn't have social media outreach people working to further Blockstream's interests?
To say that Adam is some sort of PR mastermind overseeing a large organization of paid shills is ridiculous. Adam has very specific skill sets and PR - lets just put it kindly - is no way one of them. Roger is much much more capable of such action and in fact owns a social media paid to shill service. But even then, Ill refrain from speculating as to Rogers true impact. Conspiracy theories are lame.
I never said Adam was a PR mastermind. He's just the Blockstream CEO. I imagine he mostly contracts with firms that specialize in public relations (PR) for ideas and delegates to Blockstream's Chief Strategy Officer.
Many organizations engage in social media outreach to some degree. A company like BitPay is on the low end of the spectrum whereas a company like Blockstream is at the top end. Remember when Samson Mow left BCC after all his social media trolling and the various campaigns with the hats? He was then officially hired by Blockstream as their Chief Strategy Officer. Samson is a Dragon's Den member. This group's purpose is to brainstorm and then put into action social media ideas to further the cause of Blockstream/Core. Again, this is not a "theory" -- this is all public information.
Incidentally, Bitcoin Unlimited considered hiring a Canadian PR firm about a year ago to help with some of our outreach efforts. I thought it was interesting that after a few meetings, the firm learned that our goals were "in opposition to a large Bitcoin company they represented" and then declined to work with us. We later learned through side channels what we expected that this firm was Blockstream.
The point I'm trying to make is that "social media outreach" to shape the narrative in a group or company's favor is not a conspiracy theory. It is a fact.
Hold on. First you started talking about shills and now you are equating shills with PR firms. Which you tried to hire and my have hired yourself. So now that PR is just shilling, then, yes, everyone does it. Big farking deal.