- Kumar, Srijan, et al. “An army of me: Sockpuppets in online discussion communities.” Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, 2017.
Summary:
Sockpuppets created by unreal users may mislead or have an negative impact in online discussion communities. In this paper, the author present a study about sockpuppets in online discussion communities. The data they use comes from nine online discussion communities and consisted of 2.9 million users. The author first identify sockpuppets by using features like similar names and same IP addresses posted within close time proximity. Then they analyzed the posting behaviors and linguistic features of such sockpuppets. As a result, the author was able to find the behavior of sockpuppets is different from that of ordinary users. Including tendency to write more posts than ordinary users, and shorter posts with a lot of first person pronouns.
Reflection:
I like this paper, and there are some points to be discussed. In the data selection, I can see that on average per puppy master owns 2 puppy accounts. This is oddly consistent across all 9 communities and might there be a reason why? And one level deeper into this question, What’s the motivation of such sockpuppets. As we can see in the figure 6, those topics (usa, world,politics,justice,opinion) have significant higher amount of sockpuppets compared to other topics. So I think it’s safe to assume that people use sockpuppets mainly for political-oriented discussions. But in the data statistics, we can see that the number of sockpuppets in political sites compared to the MLB and allkpop is still average 2 accounts per puppy master, and not even a significant difference in the ratio of #sockpuppets vs #users. Or what is a better way to verify the results of such detection methods. There can also be multiple purposes of such sockpuppets. It can be from PR companies to give positive comments on a celebrity, on a certain event or for a product. In fact this is really common practice in some regions, the image of a celebrity can greatly affect the revenue of related movies and product. But I’d say it’s almost impossible to get dataset from these PR companies who own a large number of such sockpuppets.
