Sock puppet
From Encyclopedia Dramatica
A sock puppet is an account that is under the control of another user, and has the purpose of creating the illusion of another online persona, or giving the illusion of support. They are present in every online community, and have been a fact of life on Usenet since the beginning, an example being the group alt.anti-eBay where all other posters have been driven away by sock-driven flame wars.
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[edit] Liar liar
While always a part of the internet, sock puppets came into their true potential on wikis, due to the nature of site and the politics of the users. With the ease of creating a secondary (or tertiary and so on) persona, you can troll and vandalize while keeping your "real" name clean, or make it seem that you are an Internet celebrity who actually has at least 100 friends. You can also give your position the appearance of "popular support," this actually being a necessity of winning arguments on a wiki.
Example:
- Prima: u r teh ghey!
- Secunda: am not!
- Omega: r so!
- Alpha: r 2!
- Prima: see, evre1 knows!
A sock puppet is a valuable tool in any flame war, where you can just endlessly parrot your own comments, driving away the opposition through sheer weight of words, until you are the last editor standing. There's nothing quite like being alone.
[edit] On LJ
A sock journal is an additional account on LiveJournal and similar sites, used to circumvent a ban_set, to allow semi-anonymous trolling, or to support the puppeteer in an argument.
Sock journals multiplied overnight on LiveJournal when the invite code system was removed, allowing anyone to make as many journals as they wanted. When used to troll or otherwise deflect responsibility, sock journals are no better than anonymous pussies, in fact, they're the same fucking thing.
[edit] On Encyclopedia Dramatica
Encyclopedia Dramatica has been frequently haunted by sock puppet infestations. Once there was a conspiracy that ED's administrator corps was entirely composed of one person, Jacknstock. Jack along with his alter ego Aussieintn obtained sysops, although no one knows how, and together ruled the Warcraft article with an iron fist. This was all part of an organized attempt at a palace coup, the mastermind behind the plan was creating a sock puppet a month, each gaining admin status, within a year he would've held majority power in ED. Fortunately, everything went to hell when Jacknstock blocked the wrong person. However, to this day the true status of EdSysOp, Anonadmin, and Banaan remain a mystery.
The ever brittle Samsara would later take up the sock torch. He made the accounts User:AnHeroIsSpeltWrong and User:RoundHouseKickToTheFace to hide his shame for being banned from ED IRC by Caelum in the summer of 2006. He would return a year later in 2007, using dozens of accounts to expose a furfag troll for actually being a butthurt emo who couldn't handle being trolled himself. Samsara also got pwned by Jayjg on Wikipedia under the name Anomo for trying to run 9000 socks at once.
[edit] On Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the "encyclopedia that anyone can edit," but what if after a while you discover that people disagree with your views and wikistalk you across all the articles? There are a number of things that can get you into trouble even on your very first day:
- Vandalism (saying things people don't like)
- Libel (saying things people don't like)
- Hate speech (saying things people don't like)
- Trolling (saying things people don't like)
- Harassment (saying things people don't like)
- Flame wars (saying things people don't like)
- Disruption (Disagreeing when you get yelled at for the above six reasons)
At this point you can either get banned or fall back, regroup, and return with a big bunch of your friends to overwhelm the opposition (The Wikipedia Jews being the canonical example). But what if you don't have any friends, an event pretty common on the internet. Luckily, there is still a way for you to win that content dispute. You saw this screen before, just go back to the Special:UserLogin page and you know the rest. Make sure to create a user page that looks different from yours and make a few other edits first. Also another easy way to avoid detection, even from those with Level 10 CheckUser powers, is to alternate between home and work accounts just like this guy. Another benefit of that method is that it doesn't even require any technical knowledge (although it does necessitate a white collar job!). It's also best to wait a couple of days too, its a dead giveaway when you post two minutes after your first account did. Voila, looks like you'll get that paragraph in just like you always wanted. But why stop there, the path to great power awaits you...
"Over 200 Socks Club" is for when you are looking at the person's sock puppet category and gotta click to the next page to see them all. The legendary Willy on Wheels lead the pack with over 1,500 socks, but the administrators deleted all of them because he was a shameless attention whore. The current leaders are:
| Place | Sock master | Socks |
|---|---|---|
| First | MascotGuy | 756 |
| Second | General Tojo | 659. |
| Third | JB196 | 528. |
| Fourth | Cplot | 452. |
| Fifth | Runtshit | 434 |
[edit] Sock Farms
A sock farm is where someone creates a sock puppet account, and then another, and another, and another, and another... These accounts all make minor edits to articles aka "farming", and as many useless ones as they can to build up their edit count. They start having conversations with one another (for an example, see ContiE's talk page on Wikipedia). Then they fall in love, get married, break up, and fight.
Eventually this farm is "harvested" and it can get administrators elected, articles deleted, kept, merged, and through sheer numbers make anything happen on Wikipedia that they want.
Like a fine wine or whiskey, sockpuppets are best left to ripen and mature for considerable periods of time, until the checkuser abilities of Thatcher and Alison expire, so they can't root out the 5 sockpuppets created from the same IP address because Wikipedia has deleted its logs by then. It is thought that the best course of action is to let the sockpuppets ripen like whiskey aging in a barrel, and by the time they are the age that Pedobear would approve most of for a member of the female sex, it's time to take them out for trolling.
[edit] Experts only
On Wikipedia there are those elite few, the Magic 23, that possess CheckUser abilities. This means that they check the IP addresses that any account edits from. While your busy socking away there can be slip-ups, you might sign a post or edit a user page with the wrong account. Since this is Wikipedia after all, and suspicion is the order of the day there, this will be noticed. A CU will be notified and an IP check conducted: "ZOMG 34 accounts edited from ip 127.0.0.1." And you're fucked in the ass. But who wants that?
- Use Tor. Liberally. If you're caught just say you're editing from China and that the secret police would kill you if they knew you were editing Wikipedia.
- Use AOL. Yuck what internet veteran uses AOL you say? A smart one, AOL gives you a new IP with every page load. CheckUser=CheckUseless!
- Open Proxies This is risky as they are blocked on sight, and just editing from an open proxy can be seen as a sign of trollkind. Well, yeah.
- Use shared IPs like cybercafes and community colleges for some of your accounts.
- Get in your car and go searching for unsecured Wireless hotspots. This is great when using troll socks to post power words. Maybe you'll even get someone else banned!
- If you live in a city like Portland that offers wireless across town...well it can't get any easier than that.
[edit] Good sock hunting
Sock puppets are like shadows in Wikipedia, they are everywhere. Some, like Durova, devote hours days weeks of their lives to ferreting them out, and yet for every ban-evading sock you terminate there will obviously be another one appearing tomorrow. It's a game you can play too! Jump into any deletion discussion or debate and try to pick them out. Which ones are alter egos of those active on the page, and which are returning exiles. Use your exceptionally well-honed linguistic analytic skills in a game that never ends. Please be warned that if you ever encounter a larger-than-usual indigo sock puppet, head for the hills, or anti-lulz will ensue.
If you find a sock puppet:
WHAT NOT TO DO
WHAT TO DO
- Blackmail them.
- Make fun of them by vandalizing their user page with your own puppet (lol irony) to announce it.
- Create a page on ED cataloging their catastrophic fail.
