What’s a sock puppet site?

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A sock puppet website is a website created to support an artificial personality, known in internet parlance as a sock puppet, shadow puppet, or glove puppet. While few puppets go as far as creating websites, preferring to remain in the shadows of message boards, blog comments, and other forums, some do and are sometimes able to dupe otherwise highly educated and well-informed individuals. A sock puppet website can be used to create the illusion that a fake personality is real, promote a viral marketing campaign, as part of an astroturfing effort, or to undermine people with opposing views.

The origins of the sock’s name are likely a reference to how easily a sock can be made. A true sock puppet may be as simple as a sock placed on the hand, but becomes an alternate personality controlled by the user. On the Internet, a sock puppet is a fake or prank account created by an ordinary user, usually for malicious purposes. A user can create a sock puppet account to reply to himself on blogs or threads, making the topic seem more interesting, or to attack people with opposing views. A sock puppet account can also be used to distort votes and polls, and generally manipulate other users of the Internet resource. Since sock puppet accounts are usually malicious, most websites frown on them.

Going beyond setting up an additional account to create an entire sock puppet website suggests serious dedication. It can also be extremely difficult to identify a sock puppet website, especially if the creator is crafty in building it, making it look like it was actually created by another person. The sock puppet website can be used to enforce a sock puppet account on an Internet forum, by creating a separate artificial identity for the fake account, or it can stand on its own as an independent entity. Because a sock puppet website can be done very well, there have been cases of serious deception, including but not limited to reprinting content from major news sources.

In a turf or false grass campaign, a puppet website can be a crucial component of the campaign. Because turf campaigns often have a large amount of money behind them, the sock puppet website can be slick, well-crafted, and very persuasive, especially to gullible readers. The website can be used to undermine the opposition, spread misleading information, or to trick people into thinking that a movement has a broad support base. Viral marketing campaigns also use this technique to pique curiosity, and many create multiple puppet websites to simulate the campaign “discussion”, thus attracting more attention.

While identifying a sock puppet website can be difficult, a few things can provide clues. Always investigate the “about us” and “contact us” areas, which may show you who is funding the website, who is involved, and other sites the site links to. Try looking up people’s names on the website to see if they actually exist beyond the confines of the sock puppet website, and try searching the domain registry information to see if you can find out who owns it. Also look closely at the language used and the resources cited, and if the site has forums, peruse them to see if you can find any clues that might suggest that the multitude of posters are actually sock puppets.

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