An Army of Me: Sockpuppets in Online Discussion Communities
Summary:
In this paper the authors study sockpuppetry across nine different communities in Disqus, a commenting social media platform. They study how sockpuppets are different from the ordinary users in terms of the language they use, online posting activity and social network. They discover that sockpuppets write shorter sentences, use more singular pronouns like ‘I’, swear more, participate in controversial topics & existing discussions and are likely to interact with other sockpuppets. Keeping these findings in mind, the authors build predictive models to differentiate pair of sockpuppets from pair of ordinary users.
Reflection:
“Twitter Bots And Sockpuppets Used Trump’s Tweets To Mess With Virginia’s Governor’s Race” [1]. Facebook detected and removed 32 fake accounts and pages from both Facebook and Instagram after identifying coordinated inauthentic behaviour before midterm elections [2] Fake accounts have not only affected elections but has also taken lives in some cases [e.g. death of Megan Meier[3]].
Sockpuppetry has inflicted almost every social media platform. The intention behind creating sockpuppets might vary though. While primary purpose of creating fake accounts on online discussion platforms might be to sway public opinion by creating census, on Quora it might be to gain upvotes and On Facebook to create a false second identity[double life hypothesis]. I’ve come accross multiple instances where people create multiple profiles with incorrect age, gender, marital status and sexual orientation. I came across a website that sells Quora downvotes “https://www.upyourviews.com/buy-quora-downvotes/”. I wonder if the operating model of such companies involve creation of several bots or sockpuppets accounts!!! Also, I can’t think of any motivation behind existence of sockpuppet accounts on websites like 4chan where users are anonymous and content is ephemeral.
I wonder if the online communities are willing to share user data along with IP traces like Disqus did. Like the authors mentioned, availability of ground truth data is also a big issue in this research. It is very difficult to build classifiers that give high accuracy without such data. Also the data used by authors will miss users that use different physical machines to access different accounts. I believe when sockpuppetry happens at a larger and professional scale, the miscreants will have the infrastructure to deploy multiple computers for multiple accounts. How to detect sockpuppets then?
Also detection of sockpuppets is one problem. How do we stop creation of such accounts? Tying accounts with some unique social identity like Aadhar or SSN? E.g Aadhar verification is mandatory on multiple matrimonial sites in india [4]
One of the author’s observation is that sockpuppets have a high page rank than ordinary users. They didnt justify or elaborate on this. Can this be contributed to their account’s high posting activity and larger network?
The authors say “Non-pretenders on the other hand have similar display names and this may implicitly signal to the community that they are controlled by the same individual, and thus may be less likely to be malicious.” First part of the statement will only be true if both sockpuppet accounts share the same network.
Authors divide the sockpuppets into three groups: supporters, non-supporters and dissenters with majority being non-supporters. While role of supporters and dissenters is clear since they are two extremes. I am not sure how non-supporters behave? A few examples from this category could have made it clearer.
The authors restricted their study to sockpuppet size 2 since majority of groups contained that no. of sockpuppets. Studying groups with >=3 sockpuppets might lead to interesting discoveries.
[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/twitter-bots-sockpuppets-trump-virginia_us_5a01039de4b0368a4e869817
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/31/facebook-has-detected-attempts-to-interfere-in-mid-terms.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_(Internet)
[4] http://www.forbesindia.com/article/special/aadhaar-latest-tool-against-fake-matrimonial-profiles/50215/1
