The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All (Sockpuppet Management Software)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED:-The-HB-Gary-Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All

by ph0rque • 15 years ago

326 119 15 years ago

dailykos.com

wybo• 15 years ago

Faking dozens of personas online gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'we are legion'.

Scary indeed.

scrollbar• 15 years ago

I've always assumed this kind of psyops has been used by, if not govt agencies, PACs or private entities. Digg commenters in particular.

bediger2• 15 years ago

Ha ha! The leak that blows the sockpuppets/trolls wide open! We knew this day would arrive, and it finally did.

But the bigger question: why didn't dailykos.com link to the Aaron Barr email in question? I ask for two reasons. First, it seems kind of Mainstream Media of them to not link to it. Trying to keep us on your site, Kos, or is this one of those "sensitive" things that must be kept out of the common man's hands, a gatekeeper function that newspapers used to exercize? Second, I want to find out more about the Persona Management Software. It seems like an opportunity for an open source project.

Vivtek9• 15 years ago

It's just a diary - the author probably just didn't think of linking to the mail, or read it elsewhere. It shouldn't be too hard to find.

I was totally thinking it would be fun to do this as open source, though. Giving propaganda tools to the common man!

GHFigs3• 15 years ago

The leak that blows the sockpuppets/trolls wide open!

Could you elaborate on this? The article only talks about ideas contained in Word documents.

bediger2• 15 years ago

Elaborate on this? Certainly. Visit a website that allows comments, and posts articles on controlversial topics. Say, techdirt.com or groklaw.net. Read all the comments for 10 articles. You'll quickly come to the realization that a number of the differently-named identities repeat a large number of the same ideas, concepts and talking points.

But all these differently-named identities have different habits of usage. Maybe one of them can't be bothered to use the shift-key, like e e cummings. One of them is named "Darryl" and posts rather rambling comments. A few of them are anonymous cowards. But over the course of a few weeks diligent followers of the comments in a blog see that all the trolls start using the same talking points at the same time. Maybe a phrase like "rich user experience" shows up in all troll comments one day. A few weeks later, any number of people chime in with "I love linux as much as the next guy, but Microsoft has a great product this time."

What I mean by "blows the sockpuppets/trolls wide open" is that this revelation finally explains how a site like Groklaw.net or techdirt.com can attract such a large number of persistent detractors. Sockpuppet/Persona Management explains how a single person can create a large number of different trolls with different writing characteristics, different vocabularies, but all with the same point of view.

bugsy8• 15 years ago

The Chinese government has the "50 cent army" which is a 300,000 strong persona ops set. Many are Chinese students in the US who are required to post pro-China posts while in school and pretend to be a random western sympathizer. This is the largest and most organized, but there are tons of these and you see them on all the major boards. Can identify them when there is something really indefensible and they are in defending it with statements like "Well, as far as I know, none of the Wall Street companies broke any laws. So if you are concerned, maybe you should blame the government for deregulating." Their accounts are full of certain themes that enable you to identify them.

At first I typed up here techniques on how to recognize them but on second thought I don't want to give them ideas on how to correct.

Of interest to me right now is whether this propaganda war can be widely unveiled. It's hard since there are likely thousands of different PR ops posting stuff so there's no single pattern, and it's subtle to distinguish between this and zealous and sincere advocates of things. It would also be pretty easy to dismiss zealous advocates as PR ops as an attack strategy against advocates. Maybe that will eventually mean sincere advocates will end up having to blog more with their real name and photo to be taken seriously.

kgtm3• 15 years ago

"Maybe that will eventually mean sincere advocates will end up having to blog more with their real name and photo to be taken seriously."

Isn't this exactly what "they" are after? Once that happens, there won't be any need for such armies. The end of anonymity means the end of free speech.

steauengeglase• 15 years ago

We should probably ask Jeff Gannon how that turned out.

ugh6• 15 years ago

I don’t think that’s true at all. Anonymity has something to do with free speech but far from everything.

If you live in a nation with rule of law and wide ranging protections of freedom of speech like the US there is no need to be anonymous in the vast majority of cases.

Anonymity should obviously still be possible but the decreased trustworthiness of anonymous statements is just something that inevitably comes with anonymity.

(Who are “they”?)

bugsy8• 15 years ago

Yeah it's kind of a different topic, I probably shouldn't have been extemporanializing (sp?) at the end of my comment and kept it more focused.

I agree with that about anonymity. People will be more tempered in what they say. Only today there is a story that a blog (http://natalieshandbasket.blogspot.com/) I had been following by a teacher was "outted". The teacher was suspended and is going to be fired because she told the truth about her students, who she didn't name. (http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/news_details/article/28/2011...) The students have since commented that although everything she said was true, she shouldn't have been allowed to say it and they want her to be fired as punishment, and that looks like it will happen. The blog was extremely useful because it showed what is really going on in schools. She had thought only her friends knew about it though and that obviously wasn't true since I had no idea who she really was until today, but I knew about her secret blog since it had been linked to from some site previously, and then I bookmarked and followed it. No doubt a lot of other people did this as well. Her mistake was to even let her friends know who she was because one of them outted her. Also she had a small thumbnail of herself sitting in the distance, which may have confirmed to someone who she was.

Without this anonymity, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that she would not have been able to say the things she did. We can see exactly what happened as soon as her identity was known.

A persona such as an anonymous blog can have as much credibility as someone whose birth certificate you have seen and held. The key is that it's an established and consistent persona with a personality. So some are sincere and promote free speech and honesty, others are manipulative lies paid for by governments and corporations. Which is which you can tell (I sure hope) by looking at their history of posting. One may post unpopular ideas and be worth listening to and you know they are real because there is a human je ne sais quois (sp?) that identifies them as real, something that is not present in 50 cent army posts.

ghostDancer• 15 years ago

Prosionist groups have been making this in Europe, blogs and comenting in newspapers every time they think there are anti Israel news or comments. And it's the same as you say , it's easy to identify them when they try to defend some thing impossible to defend. And sometimes is sad because even when they have a point the things they say discredit what they are defending, they do more harm to Israel than help. That began if i can recall after the operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

stcredzero2• 15 years ago

It would also be pretty easy to dismiss zealous advocates as PR ops as an attack strategy against advocates. Maybe that will eventually mean sincere advocates will end up having to blog more with their real name and photo to be taken seriously.

Anonymous is basically a nebulously distributed, decentralized, persona ops group. They manage to be taken seriously without revealing real identities because they can successfully prosecute actions against high media value targets.

EDIT: They also continually try to convince the Internet at large that they shouldn't be taken seriously.

jeff18• 15 years ago

Do you have any evidence of this? [not a suck puppet]

bugsy8• 15 years ago

Just google the term I used.

Confusion• 15 years ago

However, as you imply, these sockpuppets are easy to recognize and are not taken seriously, because they don't make sense. Sheer volume can't make up for that. In other words: I don't believe they are capable of succesfully pulling it off. Responding sensibly in a conversation requires skills far above those of Watson, Deep Blue and the latest and greatest incarnation of Elisa.

crux_3• 15 years ago

You must not leave news.yc very often. ;)

99% of the time, there are few/no conversations on the internet, only shouting matches and circle-jerks.

bugsy8• 15 years ago

Thinking about this some more. Anonymity is required for democracy to work properly. Citizens of a society need to be able to speak candidly without fear of reprisal. That's just the way it is because power attracts the corrupt and the corrupt will use their power to silence dissent. Egypt could not figure out all of who was posting things against the government, so they just shut down the whole internet to try to stop anonymous speech. In the US there seems to be more control of networks and Palintir is a defense contractor that sells software to figure out who is talking to who and what their real identity is. I am sure Palintir will be making lots of sales to governments right now that don't want to see the middle east revolutions that are occurring right now happen in their own tyrannical dictatorships and corporatocracies.

The HBGary scandal involves multiple companies, not just the token one (HBGary) which has been "thrown under the bus" as a sacrifice and distraction. This is going on right now in other companies as well, so punishing HBGary doesn't slay the dragon.

Corporations and governments are gaming the anonymous free speech system by astroturfing, persona management, sock puppetry etc. There are armies of people posting fake opinions in an effort to manipulate public opinion and steer it towards agendas which are not sincerely held by the people posting them. They are posting only because it is their job and they are being paid. This activity is very destructive to democracy because it alters things from being the true will of the people. It is tantamount to election tampering.

It is critical that the public develop a response to this in the form of tools for identifying this activity.

One excellent tool is Anonymous's randomly discovering and the publishing incriminating emails. This activity is beneficial to democracy. However, its success is highly dependent on random chance and luck. It is also very illegal. Right now law enforcement is doing everything they can to track down the people who uncovered the wide spread and insidious wrongdoing. Punish the whistleblower is probably not going away.

The public also needs tools which are legal to use.

There are efforts right now to "build a new internet" that preserves anonymity and thus free speech. That is good but more is necessary.

Another thing which is needed is for Palintir-like systems which can peek behind the scenes, uncover connections between posts, patterns of posting and patterns of speech, to be written and open sourced. These systems can be used to identify sock puppets. They can also be used as a weapon to unmask the anonymous and attack free speech, but they are already being done to do that. We need these tools on both sides now to level the playing field.

nitrogen2• 15 years ago

How about translation tools that convert writing by one person into the style of another? I suppose it would just be another escalation in the arms race...

Supermighty• 15 years ago

>Thinking about this some more. Anonymity is required for democracy to work properly.

There was a thread on hacker news about this recently. I can't find it but here is the article it linked to.

http://open.salon.com/blog/kent_pitman/2011/02/12/using_real...

unsigner2• 15 years ago

Somehow the left considers the Internet their backyard, and are extremely surprised and offended when opponents dare to play with "their" toys.

locopati• 15 years ago

Can you expand on your comment to explain how it makes any sense?

stcredzero2• 15 years ago

Many people who know me consider me to be "left" but it makes sense to me. The Internet is just a medium. It doesn't favor any particular viewpoint. There's this idea from summer movies that the "good guys" are always hip with the new tools. That's not true. If anything, it does tend to be the underdogs or insurgents that are the early adopters, but this status has nothing to do with "good/bad" or with any particular political affiliation.

hristov• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, the "explanation" feature is not built into the sockpuppet software yet, it is still in alpha, but I am sure in a 6-9 month period you will be able to get some kind of vague generic explanation.

invertd• 15 years ago

Would you make the same comment when they turn and use their "toys" against you?

mquander2• 15 years ago

Can I take it, then, that you like the idea of federal contractors spending taxpayer dollars on semi-automated sockpuppets in order to spam propaganda on their behalf, as long as it's not liberal propaganda?

unsigner2• 15 years ago

No, I definitely don't like the idea of a government spending taxpayer money on any kind of domestic brainwashing operations, high-tech or traditional-media.

jcromartie2• 15 years ago

What's more amazing is the USAF solicitation for bids on this kind of software. They say it's for use in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Florida.

imajes• 15 years ago

that'd be where they'd observe it from, or whatever other neutral ops outside of the theater of war is; not that they intend to use it against florida.

jcromartie2• 15 years ago

I understand it is not to be used in Florida, but it's CENTCOM from what I understand. That would seem to indicate a more overarching and widespread intent.

jsm386• 15 years ago

I am not going to take a position one way or the other as I know nothing about them, but I've seen this group come up as an issue on Reddit every so often: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Force

see: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+jidf

Vivtek9• 15 years ago

If they're worried about this level of sockpuppetry, wait until the sockpuppets get automated. It's this kind of lapping-up-against-the-Singularity stuff that will make H. sapiens obsolete in the end.

bugsy8• 15 years ago

Well the article does talk about that. And there are plenty of bot posters out there as well, they were quite notorious in manipulating stock prices.

Terminology note - sockpuppet is a Persona that is created to back up the opinions of second Persona. The general term here seems to be Persona, of which sockpuppet is a specific kind of Persona.

Vivtek9• 15 years ago

Bah. It's still a sock puppet. Calling it a persona just makes it sound reputable.

anguslong• 15 years ago

tl;dr Contractor develops psyops backend for the cloud. Creates fake persona pool. Uses anonymizer/chameleon for IP obfuscation, vmware/virtualbox instances for each persona, enables deploying to vps around the world. Uses system to age personas via social/email accounts and salt with rss, social & checkin data.

RFP: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id...

bugsy8• 15 years ago

That is a pretty &!@(&ing awesome link you pulled out there with an actual Air Force project that does just this thing.

Wow. Saved to disk in case that page vanishes without a trace.

joelhaus2• 15 years ago

Ha, saved as well... it's a gem.

I've got to believe that the social networks and Google have been thinking about way to combat this problem too. I wonder what kind of impact Google's open-source two-step authentication [1] (and other types of mobile device verification systems [2]) will have on efforts to develop meaningful persona management software. If implemented properly, mobile device verification would surely inhibit such efforts.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/ [2] http://openid.net/2009/09/09/yahoo-paypal-google-equifax-aol...

EDIT: Didn't notice before, so not sure if they just added it, but the same RFP is duplicated & linked to at the bottom of the article.

alexophile• 15 years ago

Social/crowdsourced companies do this all the time, they just don't have such sophisticated software. But that's hardly an inconceivable jump - I would certainly not be surprised to see a number of in-house versions of this at work all over the internet.

I worked with an early stage company that relied on user-generated content that essentially did this but didn't tell the new CMs, so we spent the first couple weeks trying to get increased activity out of the clones.

Bonus example, there was an interview with the founder of thathigh.com on here not too long ago where he talked about doing exactly this.

The game isn't new, only the players - and you can always spot a newb, even if he has really nice equipment.

[Edit, appending part of my reddit comment on the sme article]: Here in Chicago, elections are (or at least were for a long time) considered to be basically a running joke. It's a city of horriffic corruption, and everyone's pretty much gotten used to it. This should be far more unsettling than gov contractors manufacturing an echo chamber. At least when they're sneaky about it you know they're scared.

philthy• 15 years ago

Nigerians, scammers, fraudsters, and all other sorts of Internet criminals already do this kind of stuff and have for years. Plus this happens in the real world, it's just called identity fraud. This once again further proves the technological ineptitude of the US Government and it's contractors, this isn't in any way an advanced concept. HB Gary got rooted by a 16 year old girl, what is everyone so worried about?

jarin2• 15 years ago

Wow, kind of makes you wonder what really sparked off the revolutions in the Arab world, doesn't it?

motters• 15 years ago

This is the first time that I've heard about "Persona Management Software", and I think it raises some serious questions. Taken to its logical conclusion systems like this could be used to influence the outcomes of elections and other kinds of collective decision making, so there's a debate to be had over whether use of this kind of software should be legal or to what extent it should be regulated if it's used by companies or government agencies.

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

I've found that in the last couple of years, I keep expecting the internet to be one way and it keeps being another.

So for instance, they say if you want people to read your work, concentrate on quality. But that's bullshit, what you need to concentrate on is popularity. On any given day, boards all over the place are full of high-ranking articles that are crap that people vote on simply because the author is popular.

Then they say that the wisdom of the crowds will help pick clear winners. But the wisdom part begins to look like mob rule and crowds can be easily gamed, as this article shows.

I could go on, but I think I'm not alone in realizing that the cool interconnected internet that I wanted and the one we're actually getting are two completely different things.

So on one hand I congratulate this author -- we critically need to get this information out and emphasize it. But on the other hand, it's just another in a long series of "So, you thought it worked this way? Boy were you wrong." kind of things.

So I'm left wondering: do we all just sit around and whine about how things aren't turning out the right way? Go out and "fight the system" Adapt? Make the most of it? What? While you can fight the system if it's the local town government putting up a stoplight, fighting the system effectively and honorably where the system is billions of people of hundreds of cultures all interacting randomly is a bit too much to fit in my head.

Apologies for the rant. Just seemed like a pattern I've noticed of late.

anon808• 15 years ago

don't whine or fight. create the world you want to live in.

the internet doesn't work one way or another. people on the internet work one way or another. you don't like how some groups are working, don't work with them. work another way. everyone has a choice. i know it can seem overwhelming when a lot of people choose to work one way that doesn't seem right, but don't let it get you down. you have a choice too, and you don't have to work the same way they do. work a different way.

sfphotoarts• 15 years ago

The internet is really many superimposed communities. Expecting the internet, or pretty much anything else to be a certain way is setting yourself up for unfulfilled expectation.

The internet is a rapidly changing place and filled with enormous diversity of people, views and interests.

_b8r02• 15 years ago

Whenever I think of things like your comment I'm reminded of the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi:

    “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

snth• 15 years ago

I don't think this helps much with the problem outlined in the original post. All you need is one guy running this "persona management" software to offset lots of guys refusing to use it.

moe• 15 years ago

I try to adhere to that motto. I really do.

Sadly I had to learn that it very often conflicts with "making a living".

gruseom2• 15 years ago

This statement actually comes from Gandhi's grandson Arun and only goes back to 2001.

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi

http://www.google.com/search?q=be+the+change+we+wish+to+see+...

(If anyone can find more, speak up - I only googled for a minute.)

Tichy• 15 years ago

Everything is on the internet. What is the internet? I think we are talking of specific views we take of the internet. Like if we mostly visit sites through HN, we have the HN view of the internet.

So if anything, we can say the views are failing us.

Soqus• 15 years ago

"But the wisdom part begins to look like mob rule and crowds can be easily gamed, as this article shows."

How does this article show that? I'm not arguing that they cannot be, I'm merely pointing out that the article doesn't 'show' that. Its not the subject.

mquander2• 15 years ago

Honestly, it works fine for me, and although I find the actions described in this story to be a hilarious and unethical waste of resources, they certainly aren't making my Internet any worse in a general sense.

What do I give a crap about some sockpuppet content ghostwritten by a Fed -- since when am I reading the comments on Daily Kos, or some random dude's Twitter? Who cares what articles people vote on? I spend most of my online time reading an incrementally updated newsmagazine of my personal favorite writers on the planet via RSS.

Are you concerned about undue influence on public opinion? The only people being swayed or convinced by some sockpuppet campaign are those whose opinion is already made of shit. Do you really think that J. Random Congressman or Alfred E. Media Representative would be likely to have a sane, rational opinion on the issues of the day anyway? A couple dozen or hundred automated propaganda-bots are not likely to make his decisions even worse.

There's no reason to care about how the winners are picked. The cool thing about the Internet is that there's room for everyone, and that doesn't seem to be changing at all. That is the right system, and we're already there.

jacques_chester3• 15 years ago

> The only people being swayed or convinced by some sockpuppet campaign are those whose opinion is already made of shit.

Social proof is a studied, verified effect, where people's opinions are shaped by the opinions of others at a subconscious level.

Do you hate laugh tracks? Me too. But research shows that people think shows are funnier with the laugh track than without, even if they say they hated the laugh track.

Are you annoyed by every brand saying they're "The Leading X" or "The Number 1 Y"? Me too. But marketing which includes these claims leads to higher sales than marketing without.

When I was a sales puke, I applied this principle to selling add-on insurance for car rentals. I identified a point in my pitch where I could add the words, "almost everybody takes the package". That's all, that's it. In the week when I first applied it, it added almost 10% to my rate of sale and the improvement persisted when I retained those words.

And I was dealing with all walks of life. Holiday makers of all kinds. From backpackers, to CEOs of german industrial giants, to law-school professors from leading US universities, they were all affected by the truthful claim that almost everybody bought the package from me.

Social proof works.

sort3d• 15 years ago

The sad fact in the U.S. is that it isn't the people with thoughtful consistent opinions on important issues that have real impact on the politicians that get sent to Washington to tackle current problems. It is instead the easily swayed fickle "undecideds" that determine the powers that be.

This state of affairs makes the tools in this article extremely disturbing in the context of government contractors.

gbrindisi• 15 years ago

Never forget that people "outside" and people on internet are, in the end, always the same people.

Vivtek9• 15 years ago

Ironic that you express this viewpoint here - online, in a small community with extremely high signal-to-noise, where sockpuppetry could easily be discovered.

The people who care about quality conversation will find places like this - and the rest of the people never mattered anyway.

dasil003• 15 years ago

iuguy's Gandhi quote may be the best response, but I have something more verbose to say.

Popularity is powerful. Anything that matters is going to be dominated by popularity in some form. Politics, fast food, movies, etc, are all in the state they are due to winning popularity contests. The internet is just late to the party. The cool internet that agreed with your values just happened to be visible for the first few decades of its existence because you were the right demographic. However it was inevitable that sooner or later the public at large would get a whiff of how cool the net was, and pretty soon money comes into the equation, and it's all downhill.

But in reality the cool internet is bigger today than it ever was before, it's just obscured by all the spammy, sock-puppetry, pointless-celebrity-tweeting bullshit that you've come to expect. It's easy to fall into the trap that you need to compete with that, but you don't. Popularity is good for business, but it doesn't feed your soul. If you do really great work, the people who pay attention it will appreciate it immensely. There are bloggers who I believe contribute more to the world (at least my world) than Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Williams even though I use Facebook and Twitter every day.

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

Without a 50kiloword post it's difficult to fully respond to your complaints.

However, I will say this, which I hope will help. Often times it is difficult to get a cohesive understanding of the changes caused by technological change without the distance of history or an external perspective. Change is chaotic in the short term, and it can be difficult for any individual human who is compromised by biases, limited knowledge, and an undue focus on the very immediate past and very immediate proximity to extract meaningful information about long term change from that muddle. More so when those long term changes are rather subtle (as they often are). More so when only an observer from the future who has had the benefit of immersive familiarity with what in the present are novel paradigms would be able to look at our time and pick out the teeniest inklings of those changes. To us those new things are still new things, and not even fully formed yet, and thus all the more difficult to define, understand, and recognize.

Moreover we have a natural desire for change to manifest rapidly and completely. We want everything to be resolved utterly in the 5th act of a 2 hour play. But that's not how things work in the real world. In the real world it's always 2 steps forward, 1 step back, and then 1 forward and 2 back, and then 2 forward and 1 back again. Slow, incremental, subtle progress, often too slow, incremental, and subtle to be very satisfying. Worse yet, advances such as the present one (exposing previously secret underhanded schemes to the public at large) may seem like setbacks, because even though the result is greater transparency (forcefully made) in the process something bad was exposed.

In short, I don't think it's possible for anyone to fully understand the changes that are going on in the world (or even in the US) right now, let alone to forecast how those and other changes will manifest years and decades down the road.

I do think we are at a turning point in history at the moment. I think we will either tip into a period of greater individual liberty, richer freedoms of expression, greater individual autonomy, etc. on the one hand or we will tip into a period of diminished individual liberty, more authority in the hands of the state and big organizations (corporations, unions, NGOs, etc.), and a de facto division of hierarchy of rights between a new effective aristocracy and commoners. However, I think it is far, far too early to say which way the scales will tip, and there are promising signs that it will tip in the direction of liberty.

Consider this story in and of itself. Sure, there were nefarious plans for "sock puppet management", but not only do we have no clue how well such things would have worked in practice (I'm skeptical) but the plans have been spilled all over the internet for the world to gawk at, which will likely cause a huge backlash against anyone attempting to do this sort of thing as well as keep people on the lookout for instances of the phenomenon.

Vivtek9• 15 years ago

a de facto division of hierarchy of rights between a new effective aristocracy and commoners

Y'know, that has to be the only outcome that can be an object of fear - and yet, I just can't help thinking that there is so much in our cultural history that would subvert that as soon as it became at all overt.

The only reason they haven't sparked significant backlash is that people can still imagine they're not commoners under a jackboot. What will happen when that state change comes about? What happens when the sleeping people wake up?

b_emery• 15 years ago

I think this illustrates a need for an HN-like internet-global karma system. That is, unless some of you have sockpuppet armies upvoting your comments.

Say it isn't so!

epochwolf3• 15 years ago

And who will you trust to implement such a system? How would you prevent gaming? How do you prevent someone from bribing the operators?

narrator• 15 years ago

I used to see sock puppets on yahoo finance message boards for small energy companies. The sock puppet would repeat the same five or six canned messages several times a day under multiple aliases. They would never reply to criticism or anyone responding to their posts. I would come back weeks later and the same sock puppets would still be there with the same repetitive slightly varying messages posted in enormous quantities.

my suspicion is that this was some bigger energy companies paying some black PR to pay people (probably in a business process outsourcing sweat shop somewhere in a developing country) to repetitively post these things, or write scripts to do so, in order to drive down the price of these small energy companies so they could be acquired.

The hallmark of a sockpuppet is not responding with anything but a canned ad-hominem response, and posting the same set of talking points in enormous volume.

bugsy8• 15 years ago

> The hallmark of a sockpuppet is not responding with anything but a canned ad-hominem response, and posting the same set of talking points in enormous volume.

That's a good list for that style of Persona. Here's an example:

http://www.reddit.com/user/jmeasley/

jrwoodruff• 15 years ago

It surprises me that this hasn't been done already. In fact, I would be willing to bet that somewhere, this type of software exists in some form. I'm fairly sure (although cannot prove, of course) that I watched this happen to a blog critical of a large publishing company here in the U.S.:

http://gannettblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/trolls-inc-take-this...

Probably didn't use fancy software, but there certainly appeared to be a concerted attack effort against the blogger for an extended and sustained period of time.

Natsu• 15 years ago

During the 2008 elections, it was hard to miss the fact that one guy managed to get the first comment on almost every single news site with comments.

Maybe he had no life, but I strongly suspected that that was his job. Also, he vanished immediately after the elections were over.

jleader• 15 years ago

I can't believe no one's mentioned http://xkcd.com/810/ about training sock puppet bots to make relevant contributions to the conversation.

Anon84• 15 years ago

I wonder if any of the ones we found with Truthy ( http://truthy.indiana.edu/ ) were generated in this way

NHQ• 15 years ago

Would creating fake personas be considered government propaganda?

ttt567• 15 years ago

In Internet quantity is quality.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

"On the internet, nobody knows you are a stick drive."

The concept isn't particularly astonishing, Here is the TV show from 71 that used this for entertainment http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067551/

Of course with the Internet everything can be bigger/badder/etc. Looking at is from the perspective of algorithmic search (my current interest) its fascinating to see software which creates an entire "fake community" using things like markov-chain spam on hastily concocted php forum sites to simulate an organic community of interest.

Literally, there is no way to know. Maybe we'll know that AI is here when it devlops sentience and then posts something witty on our facebook wall. New trust models, not 'friending' anyone you haven't met in person, alternative communities for verbal interaction.

It just reminds me of the adage that demand creates products to fill that demand as soon as the economics favor creation.

The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All (Sockpuppet Management Software)

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