Sock puppets
Fictitious online identities operated by one person or organization to praise themselves, attack critics, or simulate independent agreement, so that one voice passes for several.
A single account arguing for a position is one opinion. Five accounts agreeing with it are a consensus, if the audience does not know they are the same hand. The sock puppet is that hand's extra glove: a persona with a name, a photograph, a history, and views that happen to support the operator's. Where bots supply volume, puppets supply the appearance of individual, human, independent judgment, and they can argue, reply, and adapt.
The device is testimonial and bandwagon made by one person out of nothing. Its industrial form is the persona farm, in which paid staff run dozens of identities each; the Internet Research Agency's operators kept character sheets. Exploits Social Proof and False Consensus Effect.
Historical examples
The Internet Research Agency's operators ran hundreds of American personas, each with a name, a location, a political identity, and a following, some of which reached hundreds of thousands of followers and were quoted by mainstream outlets as real citizens. The personas argued with each other across the political spectrum to deepen division. Court filings and the Senate report reproduce their character notes.
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Report on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 2. Washington, 2019; United States v. Internet Research Agency LLC et al., Indictment, D.D.C., 16 February 2018.
Kumar and colleagues studied sock puppets across nine online communities and found they could be identified by behavior: puppets of the same operator posted in the same threads, at the same times, with similar language, and were more likely to agree with each other and to be downvoted by others. The study built the first large-scale classifier for the device.
Kumar, Srijan, Justin Cheng, Jure Leskovec, and V. S. Subrahmanian. "An Army of Me: Sockpuppets in Online Discussion Communities." Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web (2017): 857–866. Source
In advertising and commerce
Product forums, review sites, and encyclopedias have all fought sock puppets since they opened: authors reviewing their own books under other names, companies praising themselves and disparaging rivals, editors using multiple accounts to win disputes. Wikipedia's investigations of sockpuppetry are public and number in the thousands.
Mayzlin, Dina, Yaniv Dover, and Judith Chevalier. "Promotional Reviews: An Empirical Investigation of Online Review Manipulation." American Economic Review 104, no. 8 (2014): 2421–2455.
Find a comment thread where several accounts strongly defend the same product or person. Compare their posting histories and phrasing. Could they be one person?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
Four accounts joined the forum on the same day, and all four spend their time praising one contractor and attacking the one negative reviewer.
What to notice. Multiple personas, one hand; the shared timing and target give it away.
"As a lifelong resident and mother of three," begins the comment, from an account with a stock photograph created yesterday.
What to notice. A constructed identity supplies the independent, ordinary voice the operator lacks.
The columnist's most enthusiastic commenter shares his unusual spelling of "definately" and posts within minutes of each column.
What to notice. Writing habits and timing expose one person behind two names.
Sources
- Kumar, Srijan, et al. "An Army of Me: Sockpuppets in Online Discussion Communities." WWW 2017. doi:10.1145/3038912.3052677
- U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Report on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Volume 2. Washington, 2019.
- Mayzlin, Dina, Yaniv Dover, and Judith Chevalier. "Promotional Reviews." American Economic Review 104, no. 8 (2014): 2421–2455. doi:10.1257/aer.104.8.2421