But before I get into that, a sock account means a web account where you use it as a false identity. Sock accounts are used either to inflate numbers or give the appearance that people are talking about certain things in order to trick people into thinking something is interesting. Click to see full answer
Full Answer
What is a sock account on Facebook?
There are generally two forms of fake Facebook accounts: Sock Puppets and Bot accounts. Sock Puppets: Sock puppet profiles are almost always operated by a human who is pretending to be someone else. According to Wikipedia, a sock puppet is, “An online identity used for purposes of deception.
What is a sock puppet social media account?
A sock puppet, in the context of online communications, is a fake identity created to promote someone or something through blogs, wikis, forums or social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter.
What is sock puppet in Osint?
Sock puppets are nothing but detailed created fake social media accounts to research in OSINT without giving up the true identity. Sock Puppets are basically aliases, fictitious persona profiles created by someone else with specific goals in mind and is part of an OSINT Social Engineering technique.
How does sock puppet work?
A sock puppet or sockpuppet is a puppet made from a sock or a similar garment. The puppeteer wears the sock on a hand and lower arm as if it were a glove, with the puppet's mouth being formed by the region between the sock's heel and toe, and the puppeteer's thumb acting as the jaw.
Is it illegal to create a fake social media account?
Whether for Facebook accounts, Xbox Live, or a pointless survey that your friend asked you to fill out, using a fake name online in any capacity could get you arrested. Moreover, you could be charged with the federal crime of hacking, which is punishable for between 5-20 years in prison.
Why is it called a sock account?
It is a reference to the manipulation of a simple hand puppet made from a sock, and is often used to refer to alternative online identities or user accounts used for purposes of deception.
What are cyber socks?
SOCKS, which stands for Socket Secure, is a network protocol that facilitates communication with servers through a firewall by routing network traffic to the actual server on behalf of a client. SOCKS is designed to route any type of traffic generated by any protocol or program.
What is Osint used for?
What is OSINT Used For? By gathering publicly available sources of information about a particular target an attacker – or friendly penetration tester – can profile a potential victim to better understand its characteristics and to narrow down the search area for possible vulnerabilities.
How do you make a sock puppet at home?
0:155:33How to Make Sock Puppets | Fast and Easy DIY - YouTubeYouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipPull the sock over just keeping that cardboard right there that becomes the mouth and remember theMorePull the sock over just keeping that cardboard right there that becomes the mouth and remember the heel is going to be on top of the head now is where you get to decorate.
What is a SoC account?
Students may need a School of Computing (SoC) account if they are enrolled in a CSCE, SOFT, or RAIK course. This SoC account is used to log in to computers in the computer labs in Avery Hall, and is also used to access various SoC servers and websites used to complete and submit lab and homework assignments.
What is the meaning of sock puppets?
Definition of sock puppet 1 : a hand puppet made with a sock. 2 : a false online identity used for deceptive purposes.
What is the history of sock puppets?
Normally, a sock puppet stage would be the size of a table and could involve up to ten puppets on stage at any one time. Where do socks come from? Socks date back as far as 750 BC and the ancient Greeks. Knitting got its start with Egyptian sheep farmers and quickly spread through the Middle East into Europe.
What is a sock account?
But before I get into that, a sock account means a web account where you use it as a false identity. The name derives from sockpuppet (where you put your hand in a sock and draw a face on the sock's toe area to use it puppet-style); even though you're the one controlling the sock, the sock is meant to be a character, as in fake, as in not real, ...
Why do people use socks?
Sock accounts are used either to inflate numbers or give the appearance that people are talking about certain things in order to trick people into thinking something is interesting.
What is the difference between a pseudonym and a sockpuppet?
A significant difference between a pseudonym and a sockpuppet is that the sockpuppet poses as a third party independent of the main account operator. Sockpuppets are unwelcome in many online communities and forums.
What is a strawman sock puppet?
A strawman sockpuppet (sometimes abbreviated as strawpuppet) is a false flag pseudonym created to make a particular point of view look foolish or unwholesome in order to generate negative sentiment against it. Strawman sockpuppets typically behave in an unintelligent, uninformed, or bigoted manner, advancing " straw man " arguments that their puppeteers can easily refute. The intended effect is to discredit more rational arguments made for the same position. Such sockpuppets behave in a similar manner to Internet trolls .
What is a sock puppet?
In Internet terms, sock puppets are online identities used for disguised activity by the operator. A sock puppet or sockpuppet is an online identity used for purposes of deception. The term, a reference to the manipulation of a simple hand puppet made from a sock, originally referred to a false identity assumed by a member ...
How old is Raphael Golb?
Golb, 50-year-old lawyer Raphael Golb was convicted on 30 criminal charges, including identity theft, criminal impersonation, and aggravated harassment, for using multiple sockpuppet accounts to attack and impersonate historians he perceived as rivals of his father, Norman Golb.
Why was Michael Hiltzik suspended?
American reporter Michael Hiltzik was temporarily suspended from posting to his blog, "The Golden State", on the Los Angeles Times website after he admitted "posting there, as well as on other sites, under false names." He used the pseudonyms to attack conservatives such as Hugh Hewitt and L.A. prosecutor Patrick Frey—who eventually exposed him. Hiltzik's blog at the LA Times was the newspaper's first blog. While suspended from blogging, Hiltzik continued to write regularly for the newspaper.
When was the WMF banned?
On October 21, 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) condemned paid advocacy sockpuppeting on Wikipedia and, on October 23, specifically banned Wiki-PR editing of Wikipedia. In August and September 2015, the WMF uncovered another group of sockpuppets known as Orangemoody.
Why was Lee Siegel suspended?
Lee Siegel, a writer for The New Republic magazine, was suspended for defending his articles and blog comments under the user name " Sprezzatura .". In one such comment, "Sprezzatura" defended Siegel's bad reviews of Jon Stewart: "Siegel is brave, brilliant and wittier than Stewart will ever be.".
What is a sock puppet?
A sock puppet account is a fake online account that a user typically uses to say good things about themselves while pretending to be somebody else. Sock accounts (as they are often called) can also be used to spread misinformation, create fake "arguments" that make a person look good, and manipulate social media and YouTube algorithms. The name sock puppet account is meant to conjure an image of a person manipulating a sock puppet, which represents the person's false online identity.
Did Twitter shut down Amazon socks?
In 2021, Twitter shut down several sock accounts that claimed to be Amazon employees who were part of Amazon's Fulfillment Center Ambassadors program. According to Amazon spokesman Ty Rogers, Amazon actually asked Twitter to investigate and take appropriate action against these sock accounts.
Who is Dean Browning?
The account, which used the name Pierre Delecto, often posted celebrations and defenses of Romney's actions. In 2020, U.S. politician Dean Browning was accused of operating a Twitter sock account, after posting a message in which he claimed to be "a black gay guy" to his official Twitter account.
How are bots and sockpuppets best identified?
Bots and sockpuppets are best identified through five key features: IP-based correlation, temporal-based correlation, signs of automation in metadata, social subgraphs, and content similarity. However, just because two bots share similar features doesn’t mean they operate in the same way.
What is a bot account?
In contrast, bots are fully automated accounts which disseminate and sometimes produce content. A simple example of a bot that is not a sockpuppet is the Big Ben Clock account on Twitter, which tweets “bong” every hour of every day. Bots are relatively rare on social media and are generally much easier to detect.
What is disinformation campaign?
Modern disinformation campaigns attempt to disseminate images or slogans replicating grassroots activism. One recent example is the Chinese information operation directed against the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, which was discovered by Twitter in August of 2019.
How many disinformation campaigns are there on Twitter?
Since October 2018, Twitter has identified at least 24 separate nation-state-level disinformation campaigns on its platform including one discovered in March 2020 that was centered in Ghana and Nigeria but directed against the United States.
What is a sockpuppet?
We define a sockpuppet as a fictitious online identity created for the purposes of deception. Sockpuppets are usually created in large numbers by a single controlling person or group. They are typically used for block evasion, creating false majority opinions, vote stacking, and other similar pursuits. Sockpuppets are as old as the internet—and even older than that. In academic literature, they are sometimes called Sybils, and they are a staple of research in distributed systems security.
What is the objective of disinformation?
The objective of a modern disinformation campaign generally isn’t to drive one political outcome—ra ther, to sow division among people or subtly drive wedges with respect to a politically or socially charged issue.
How many countries are affected by social media manipulation?
The University of Oxford estimated 70 countries were affected by state-sponsored social media manipulation in 2019, a 150% increase from just 2 years prior. Academic estimates suggest that 5-15% of all Twitter accounts are sockpuppets, while Facebook estimates that 5% of all accounts on its platform are fake.
Overview
A sock puppet is defined as a person whose actions are controlled by another. It is a reference to the manipulation of a simple hand puppet made from a sock, and is often used to refer to alternative online identities or user accounts used for purposes of deception. Online, it came to be used to refer to a false identity assumed by a member of an internet community who spoke to, or about, thems…
History
The practice of writing pseudonymous self-reviews began before the Internet. Writers Walt Whitman and Anthony Burgess wrote pseudonymous reviews of their own books, as did Benjamin Franklin.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term without reference to the internet, as "a person whose actions are controlled by another; a minion" with a 2000 citation from U.S. News and Worl…
Types
One reason for sockpuppeting is to circumvent a block, ban or other form of sanction imposed on the person's original account.
Sockpuppets may be created during an online poll to increase the puppeteer's votes. A related usage is the creation of multiple identities, each supporting the puppeteer's views in an argument, attempting to position the puppeteer as representing majority opinion and sideline opposition vo…
Investigation of sockpuppetry
A number of techniques have been developed to determine whether accounts are sockpuppets, including comparing the IP addresses of suspected sockpuppets and comparative analysis of the writing style of suspected sockpuppets. Using GeoIP it is possible to look up the IP addresses and locate them.
Legal implications of sockpuppetry in the United States
In 2008, 49-year-old Missouri resident Lori Drew was prosecuted and found guilty by a Federal Court jury in connection with the creation of a MySpace account on which she claimed to be a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans. Drew's goal had been to create a relationship with Megan Meier, a 13-year-old girl who had been in conflict with Drew's daughter. After "Josh" ended the relationship with Megan, Megan committed suicide. Drew was found guilty in connection with misrepresenti…
Examples of sockpuppetry
In 2007, the CEO of Whole Foods, John Mackey, was discovered to have posted as "Rahodeb" on the Yahoo! Finance Message Board, extolling his own company and predicting a dire future for its rival, Wild Oats Markets, while concealing his relationship to both companies. Whole Foods argued that none of Mackey's actions broke the law.
During the 2007 trial of Conrad Black, chief executive of Hollinger International, prosecutors alleg…
See also
• Catfishing
• Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia
• On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog
• Passing (sociology)
External links
• Sock puppet at The Jargon File