Sock puppet (net culture)

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Real sock puppets

A sockpuppet ( English sockpuppet , also fake account , multiaccount or double nick ; plural also multiple accounts ) is an additional user account in online jargon that was created for various reasons: It can serve to protect privacy, the purpose of which is to express opinions within an online To represent the community with several “ voices ” or to undermine the rules of the community.

Ventriloquist demonstrating a "conversation" between two puppets. In the virtual world it is much more difficult to see whether two user accounts (possibly "talking dolls") are managed by the same person .

History of origin

The term used for the first time in 1993 in Usenet alludes to a ventriloquist who speaks with his hand puppet . In contrast, meatpuppet ("meat doll "), based on sockpuppet, denotes the user account of a further owner who acts on behalf of the first owner in order to influence articles and discussions in his own way. The term was first used by William Gibson in his Neuromancer trilogy in 1984.

Because of the relatively simple possibility of creating sock puppets, it is difficult to measure in open wikis , Internet forums and comment areas of blogs and other online publications how many users actually hold a certain point of view, since one and the same person is behind several similarly arguing pseudonyms can hide.

Reasons for Using Sock Puppets

On the one hand, sock puppets can serve to protect privacy so that the main account cannot be associated with certain subject areas. In particular, when the main account is linked to the real name of the user, sock puppets are used. However, sock puppets can also be put on in an improper sense in order to discredit other users or their arguments or to pursue illegitimate purposes. The supposed protection of a "double anonymity " is exploited by using one or more secondary accounts for opinion-forming measures or disruptive actions in addition to the main account, which is usually already pseudonymous, i.e. created under a nickname and therefore not assigned to a real name or account holder, in order to create further artificial identities to act. With sock puppets, individual opinions or suggestions can also be reinforced so that they can gain a majority. They can also be used to influence opinion.

The discovery of the improper use of sock puppets leads to the exclusion of all known user accounts in Wikipedia , for example . To assign user accounts to IP addresses , authorized administrators can initiate a so-called “ check user procedure”. Outside of Wikipedia, for example, cases of abuse with sock puppets in the German-speaking media have become known in the VroniPlag Wiki .

Manipulation possibilities

In 2011, the British newspaper The Guardian reported on a software commissioned to allow the US military to manipulate social media via sock puppets . Up to 50 military employees should be able to control a maximum of 10 separate identities each. The aim should therefore be to counteract unwelcome opinions and to create false consensus in online forums that are not in English.

See also

Web links

Commons : Sock puppets  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ sock puppet. Definition. In: WordSpy.com. Retrieved December 23, 2012 .
  2. ^ Pramod Nayar: Virtual Worlds . Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks 2004, ISBN 978-0-7619-3228-4 , pp. 123 .
  3. ↑ a b c Stefan Tomik: Vroniplag Wiki Dance of the Sock Puppets. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . August 21, 2011, accessed December 23, 2012 .
  4. ↑ Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia Sociographics. (PDF; 3.2 MB) Presentation at the 21st Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, 2004. Accessed on December 23, 2012 .
  5. ↑ Anja Ebersbach, Markus Glaser, Richard Heigl: Wiki Tools: Cooperation on the Web .
  6. ^ A b Mathieu von Rohr: Internet - In the interior of world knowledge . In: Der Spiegel . No. 16 , 2010 ( online ).
  7. ^ Guido Watermann: Viral Marketing for Neo-Nazis. In: Telepolis , July 23, 2009; Retrieved December 7, 2010.
  8. ↑ Jürgen Oetting: In the wild zoo of the sock puppets. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. July 14, 2012, accessed December 23, 2012 .
  9. ↑ CheckUser policy - Meta. Retrieved April 18, 2020 (English).
  10. ↑ Michael Watzke : The downsides of crowd control. In: Deutschlandfunk . March 15, 2012, accessed December 23, 2012 .
  11. ↑ Nick Fielding, Ian Cobain: Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media ( English ) In: The Guardian . March 17, 2011. Retrieved October 20, 2013.