Persona Management, otherwise known as “sock puppets”

The “sock puppet” is a fake Internet persona, usually multiple, that is controlled by an individual who wishes to give the impression of popular support for an opinion by spreading large numbers of comments across the Internet.

The key to the effective presentation of sock puppetry is the number of fake personas that can be created and controlled: the more personas, the more effective.  We know that there are proposals for computerizing this task, and there are probably operational programs that are currently in use for this purpose.

The reason we know that there are serious proposals for programs to create/control fake personas is that someone hacked in to the email system of a large private security/intelligence company in 2010 and publicly released the contents of 75,000 emails.  Among the proposals discussed in the emails were the creation of fake documents that were to be passed anonymously to enemy organizations to discredit them.  Fake personas to be used to infiltrate enemy groups and the development of a program to control large multiples of sock puppets, described as a “persona management system”, were also proposed.  Apparently the contract for the sock puppet program was ultimately awarded to a competing firm.

Therefore, it is incumbent on someone who is reading the comment threads, as people are wont to do, to be aware that multiple comments may originate from a single source.  How would one recognize such multiples?  The presence of common elements would seem to be the most effective clue.  It is possible that multiple unique elements could be used in a series of combinations as well.  It is well to take the whole comment section with a grain or two of salt.