A hedger comes to the market already holding oil risk and trades to reduce it. A producer with barrels coming out of the ground next year is long crude whether or not it trades; selling futures converts an uncertain future revenue into a known one. A refiner is short crude and long products, and hedges the margin rather than either leg. An airline is short jet fuel. None of them is expressing a view. They are paying to remove a variable.
A speculator has no underlying exposure and takes a position to profit from price changes. The word carries a moral charge it does not deserve here: the hedger's position has to be absorbed by somebody, and the somebody is a speculator. A market of hedgers alone would be a market of sellers looking for sellers.
The categories blur in practice. A physical trader with storage is arguably hedging when it buys spot and sells forward against a contango, and arguably speculating on the spread widening. A refiner that hedges more barrels than it will process has taken a view. Regulatory classification tracks the entity, not the intent, which is one reason positioning data is a coarse instrument.
What the two groups do to prices is asymmetric in a way worth understanding. A hedger is price-insensitive: it needs the hedge on, more or less regardless of level, because the alternative is carrying the risk. A speculator is price-sensitive by construction, and will only take the other side at a level it likes. So when hedging demand is heavy and one-directional, the price required to clear it moves, and that movement is not information about supply or demand at all. It is the cost of transferring risk.
The practical use of all this is context rather than direction. Knowing that managed money is heavily long tells you something about how the market is likely to react to bad news, because a crowded position has to be unwound by somebody. It does not tell you that the news is coming. That distinction, between how a market will react and what will happen, is the line between diagnostics and prediction.