Kumar, Srijan et al. (2017)- “An Army of me: Sockpuppets in Online Discussion Communities” – Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2). ACM 978-1-4503-4913-0/17/04 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3038912.3052677
Summary
The authors discuss mainly about how sockpuppets (an user account owned by a person who has at least some other account) engage in online discussions. They found how sockpuppets tend to write differently from the normal users in general and use first person pronouns. To remove false positives while identifying sockpuppets, the IP address used by many users were discarded. The authors also introduced the Kmin concept to identify sockpuppet posts that are close in time and similar in length.
Sockpuppetry across nine discussion communities were studied and it was found that these accounts were created early in an user’s lifespan which in turn suggests they were not a consequence of the social interaction the user had in the community. They are most likely to swear and discuss controversial topic, use lesser parts of speech. They tend to generate a lot of communication and are treated harshly by the community with often receiving downvotes and even at times being blocked by moderators. Sockpuppets owned by the same puppet master tend to contribute similar content and those working in pairs try to increase each other’s popularity.
Reflection
This paper emphasizes to distinguish sockpuppets from the normal users. The paper gave us a way to understand in depth the sockpuppets. They essentially differ from the online antisocial present in discussion communities that was discussed by Justin Cheng et al [1]. Sockpuppets can be both pretenders and non-pretenders. This suggests that a part of the sockpuppet group are not trying to deceive. They created multiple accounts (often with similar usernames) to post differently in varied discussion communities. However antisocial trolls generally create accounts to with negative intention to disrupt. I believe that the non-pretenders, since some have similar usernames are not trying to hide and are benign when it comes to the intention of creating a different account.
The most valid and important concept that comes to my mind is a form of digital central authority that can moderate online accounts across the internet. (I know sounds a bit too ambitious. But please, hear me out!). India has introduced in recent years the Aadhar Card concept (The Indian take on SSN). Since last year, government is trying to link all mobile accounts, bank accounts, mobile wallets (Amazon pay etc.) to the Aadhar unique number. This would ensure authenticity. However, I would not recommend using the same ID for online purpose as well. Once the online account is hacked, a person’s identity can be easily stolen. Instead, some kind of an online digital signature can be introduced. This seems similar to the twitter and Youtube’s verified (blue tick) concept. However, I want to emphasize on it being central and that the same “digital signature” is used across all kinds of social media, discussions etc. A central authority needs to govern this digital signature generation. This verification can be applied when a person first opens an email account. This way the account is linked virtually to a person and impersonation, sockpuppetry etc. would become significantly difficult.
References
[1] Cheng, Justin et al. (2015) – “Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities”- Proceedings of the Ninth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (61-70).
