Aetheric Research, Ltd.

Sockpuppetry can be regarded as a sort of performance art, if done well.  A ‘sockpuppet’ is, in this context, an alternate and–from the perspective of other users on a forum–separate identity used for the purpose of portraying traffic in a forum of a particular desired type.  The desired image for the term is, of course, of someone arguing with a sock puppet on his own hand.

Anyone familiar with the art of ventriloquism will immediately see the similarities between the use of an alt and ventriloquism–in order to lend the act credence, there has to be some form of separate identity for the alternate persona, some sort of misdirection to distract from the person running the show, and generally some form of conflict for there to be discussion over.

In the case of internet fora–which is generally where this particular art ends up being practiced, given that a “new identity” is often as easy to acquire as a new email address–the chief difficulties come from the first two items, as the third will generally be solved by a sufficiently foresightful selection of the first.

The reasons for alting are myriad–they can be used for astroturfing, for trolling, as strawman opponents, or what have you–but they are all, in a way, examples of a performance.  Many fora will have far more lurkers–casual readers, people who just do not wish to participate, people who, for whatever reason, cannot post–than they will have participating posters; alts are often used for the purpose of gaining the support of these, rather than those that actually post.  

Building an alternate persona is much like building a character for any story.  Choose a name, map out a general description–their likes, their dislikes, hobbies, job, appearance, friends–and then put them into a situation to react appropriately.  The goal here is consistency: the puppeteer wants to maintain a consistent persona when controlling this alt, so that others will react to it as though it were a genuine person. 

This consistency is perhaps the hardest part–most of the other challenges of running an alt on a forum are merely technical and can be handled, e.g., by a few different browsers configured to run through different proxies, with due diligence and care taken to avoid making mistakes that can link the accounts together–but ensuring that one ‘personality’ doesn’t leak over to the others is much more difficult.

In many cases, alts will be fairly simplistic in nature, especially if they’re to be used for astroturfing–that is, giving the impression of broader based support for a given position or subject than actually exists.  A simple “me too” sort of persona is all that’s really required; the goal in these cases isn’t so much to persuade anyone of the merits of a topic, but to give others the impression that there is significant support and that ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ is neither a risky nor revolutionary idea–essentially, using the psychology of conformity and peer pressure to turn simulated support into the genuine article.

Slightly more complex alts can be used to form strawman opposition.  A little more development is needed than that of the astroturfer alt–it’s helpful to have the strawman actually say something discernable rather than form the background noise–but characterization can be minimal; after all, the point is to show how the “opposition” is illegitimate, and having said “opposition” be shallow, vapid, and otherwise ineffective fulfills the point of the alt.  

Trolling alts run the full gamut from basic noisemakers all the way up through lovingly crafted personae that develop over months or even years of use.  These can be some of the most complex alts, existing in every way but the real, with significant time and resources paid to their manufacture and use.  The motivations for a troll handler may differ, but the usual purpose is to create noise, a distraction, to gain attention, to harass others–but consistency in the character, in the persona of the alt, is absolutely necessary.

Another form of alt is the comittee-generated character.  This kind shares some facets with the trolling alts, in that there are significant resources put into its development over a significant time and that they are generally intended for long-term use, but it differs in a couple of important ways.  Firstly, the intent is almost always non-hostile; unlike the troll, the committee-generated alt has no inherent antagonistic purpose.  Secondly, this particular alt is run by more than one handler as the situation requires.  These alts may be used as strawmen, or they may serve (in, say, alternate reality games or the like) as a ‘consistent presence’ for an organization–a sort of virtual secretary, for instance, or as a consistent representative.  

The art of the alt comes from the time and care that is put into generating the character to be played, and in the care taken to ensure that the character’s persona remains consistent and separate from the persona of the handler.  Great skill is required to keep this persona separate from any other presence that the handler has, lest their deception be detected, as detection will generally cause significant backlash against the handler–most people do not like to be deceived.

The Examiner reports yet more fallout from the HBGary Federal leak: agencies of the US Government contracted with them to deliver “persona management” software that would enable the creation of, and use of, ten profiles per user with all the associated details required to make them appear to be independent, legitimate users.

Using “sockpuppet” accounts to build the illusion of a greater level of support on a given topic than actually exists is nothing new.  ”Alt” accounts are a fine old tradition, refined to an art by generations of trolls, and the techniques discussed by HBGary for ‘legitimizing’ their existence are largely unnecessary and overly complex.  Ultimately, any use of this program, absent some genuine talent for trolling on the part of the operator, is going to be doomed to failure.

First, when attempting to sockpuppet or astroturf a position as several different people, one’s writing style has to be disguised.  Spotting someone’s characteristic ‘fist’ is not easy, and is not an exact science, but there are many cues that will tip off the careful and attentive reader–characteristic typos, for instance, or idiosyncracies of punctuation.  Few people make their posts in exact accordance with the AP Stylebook–and those posts would themselves be highly characteristic.  Word choice, too, makes a significant difference–the English language vocabulary is large enough and contains enough synonyms for different shadings of words that word choice can often reflect the mental state of the person writing.

Secondly, using multiple personas will lead to mistakes.  It is inevitable that, when managing multiple personae, slipups will happen–this happens even to the best trolls, and is a significant factor in catching them.  All it takes is for one persona to display knowledge that the would not reasonably have as that persona, and suspicions will arise; pulling the thread will unravel the whole thing as previously unnoticed inconsistencies come to light.

Thirdly, most people are not going to bother researching the “full background” of every person they argue with on the internet.  While the facebook/myspace/etc profiles may be consistent and hang together under casual scrutiny, almost by definition the only time someone will be likely to investigate ‘em is if they’re suspicious already–at which point, various indicators (apparent monomania over a subject, lack of internet presence before a certain date, etc.) will clue in the careful investigator to the sockpuppet nature of the poster.

Fourth, approaching people with personas generated from old classmates is one of the oldest scams in the book, and the method for defeating it is so well-known as to form a trope–the “false memory gambit.”  Asking the so-called classmate, “Hey, do you remember back when such-and-such happened?” where the event described did not, in fact, happen (or, for more subtlety, did happen but they weren’t involved) is a trivially easy means of establishing identity–the “shared secret” forms the basis of many systems of cryptography.  Getting around that requires a true master of social engineering–and given HBGary’s demonstrated failures in that realm, it’s unlikely that they would be able to communicate to the software users any sort of expertise in this field.

Fifth, the IP roulette described is bound to cause difficulties.  Maintaining a static IP per persona is a reasonably good idea, albeit wasteful of IPs and unlikely to make much difference–most users of most fora are unaware of the IPs that any individual users may have; those are usually only available to administrators.  The “bank of proxy IPs” is more or less equivalent to using a TOR proxy; those will likely all be quickly flagged by administrators as being proxy IPs and, accordingly, banned.

Finally, if your propaganda message requires astroturfing and sockpuppeting to get out, there are far more effective ways of doing it (not the least of which is “writing a better propaganda message”) than sitting a bunch of airmen down to try to troll internet fora.  Single strong personalities will get far better results than a lot of shallow sockpuppets–especially given that each user is, according to that plan, responsible for ten alts apiece, the personalities and posting history of each will be, of necessity, very thin.  While this approach may fool the “Sarah Lou” school of users, it’s unlikely to work for any length of time on any messageboards with enough population to sustain such an interruption.

(And then, of course, there are always professional astroturfing agencies that already have the expertise to pull ths off properly–once again, HBGary was trying to reinvent the wheel.)