Sock puppet account
Sock puppets include online identities created to praise, defend, or support a person or organization,[2] to manipulate public opinion,[3] or to circumvent restrictions such as viewing a social media account that a user is blocked from.
[5] The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term without reference to the internet, as "a person whose actions are controlled by another; a minion" with a 2000 citation from U.S. News & World Report.
The stealth marketer creates one or more pseudonymous accounts, each claiming to be a different enthusiastic supporter of the sponsor's product, book or ideology.
[11] A strawman sockpuppet (sometimes abbreviated as strawpuppet) is a false flag pseudonym created to make a particular point of view look foolish or unwholesome in order to generate negative sentiment against it.
Strawman sockpuppets typically behave in an unintelligent, uninformed, or bigoted manner, advancing "straw man" arguments that their puppeteers can easily refute.
A particular case is the concern troll, a false flag pseudonym created by a user whose actual point of view is opposed to that of the sockpuppet.
[17] In 2006, Missouri resident Lori Drew created a MySpace account purporting to be operated by a fictitious 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans.
"Josh Evans" began an online relationship with Megan Meier, a 13-year-old girl who had allegedly been in conflict with Drew's daughter.
[25] In 2014, a Florida state circuit court held that sock puppetry is tortious interference with business relations and awarded injunctive relief against it during the pendency of litigation.
John Rechy, who wrote the best-selling novel City of Night (1963), was among the authors unmasked in this way, and was shown to have written numerous five-star reviews of his own work.
[29][30] During a panel discussion at a British Crime Writers Festival in 2012, author Stephen Leather admitted using pseudonyms to praise his own books, claiming that "everyone does it".
Lee Siegel, a writer for The New Republic magazine, was suspended for defending his articles and blog comments under the username "Sprezzatura".
In October 2020, a Clemson University social media researcher identified "more than two dozen of Twitter accounts claiming to be black Trump supporters who gained hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets in a span of just a few days, sparking major doubts about their identities," many using photos of black men from news reports or stock images "including one in which the text 'black man photo' was still watermarked on the image".
[39] As an example of state-sponsored Internet sockpuppetry, in 2011, a US company called Ntrepid was awarded a $2.76 million contract from U.S. Central Command for "online persona management" operations[40] to create "fake online personas to influence net conversations and spread U.S. propaganda" in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Pashto[40] as part of Operation Earnest Voice.
The information was determined by many to have originated with a Russian government-sponsored sockpuppet management office in Saint Petersburg, called the Internet Research Agency.
