Sock Puppets to Fight Jihad
Perhaps we should call this initiative by the U.S. military asymetric sockpuppet warfare? As reported by the Guardian, the new software being developed
could allow US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with a host of co-ordinated blogposts, tweets, retweets, chatroom posts and other interventions.
Now before any more is said (and in case you don’t read the Guardian story), it should be stressed that this “multiple persona” program has an explicit counterterrorism purpose. The intent is to counter extremist Islamic ideology. That said, as the Guardian story notes:
The discovery that the US military is developing false online personalities ““ known to users of social media as “sock puppets” ““ could encourage other governments, private companies and non-government organisations to do the same.
To which anyone who has ever spent time chatting on blogs will respond: Duh.
Indeed, as one commenter at the Guardian site says:
And of course it isn’t just the US military , as anyone who’s ever been on a Climate Change thread can verify.
In addition to “duh” I would add “dumb.” Has sock puppetry ever successfully countered anything, much less extremist ideology?
I am very sceptical that one could create a false consensus and it is not what I should do with such a tool. I would seek to destroy confidence in the medium by seeking to reduce it to a “wilderness of mirrors” where nobody knows who is real and who is not.
Hmm, I think I be too late!
For sure the InternUt has already passed the point of knowing both who and what is real.
Alex
Who needs to go to all the trouble of sowing doubt and discontent with expensive, shiny, technical psycho-manipulations, when you can just use the magical “some experts think” formula to make peoples ears prick up?
In that Guardian piece the meme of some vast US military entity controlling the web, using a method that intrinsically expects people to be too stupid to realise they are dealing with fakes, is smoothly contrasted with China’s very real and observable net management and suppresion.
The Guardian article says:
“The project has been likened by web experts to China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet.”
No mention of who these web *experts* are, and what units of *likening” were used, but hey! why let a nice bit of moral equivalence go by the way unexploited?
Oh BTW, I love the smooth segue into *this* is all happening on climate blogs. That Guardian comment isn’t on the CiF comments page anymore, but I believe it 😉
Keith Kloor you run a blog, the “Duh” and your quoting that comment from the Guardian implies you have some knowledge of this happening – can you hint at how you gained it? I am probably too dumb to notice it myself.
I would love to see any evidence of the following:
a) It happening.
B) It being effective.
C) I guess you can always cop out and say that because you can’t see (a) it must be (b) 😉
Andy,
While I agree with you about the limited value of sock puppetry, when I keep seeing stories like this, I can understand the rationale.
StuartR:
The link in the post will take you directly to the comment–it is still there, last I checked. As for proof, of course I can’t offer any. I just presume that that the camps on opposites sides of the debate have their own sock puppets.
All of this was discussed last month when HB Gary Federal was hacked. Where have you been?
That one or more sides have sock puppet armies leads to a fallacy that is commonly used in global warming discussions.
That side is just a bunch of sockpuppets controlled by The George Soros Brothers!!!!
This is done on purpose so everyone can engage in la la la i’m not listening.
But I myself see it most commonly from the warmers.
I think it”s mostly overstated, overstated with extreme prejudice.
“The link in the post will take you directly to the comment”“it is still there, last I checked.”
Sorry I was sloppy there and missed that, ta.
“I just presume that that the camps on opposites sides of the debate have their own sock puppets.”
I *know* sock puppets exist and that they are used on *all* forums, on *all* subjects. That is not new information.
However the subject of a western democratic government using sophisticated software to control multiple identities with the aims of manipulating public opinion to whatever flavour they desire, like controlling a volume knob, has been easily accepted and also smoothly morphed into accepting that this is also happening on climate blogs. Quite a claim I would have thought and worthy of further investigation rather than the cosy paranoid assumptions that are prevalent on said climate blogs.
My attempt to improve my atroshus bad spelling by pasting from Word seems to have left a lot of junk at the top of my last post.[Fixed.//KK]
Also, when I said I *know* about the existence of sock puppets in all forums, I admit to having no firm evidence of this, I will clarify. I rather meant I *assume* the liklihood of their existence. And this comes back to my assumption of the intelligence of most people being able to spot manipulation at all levels.
When I see an implicit assumption of gullibility of large swathes of people, without evidence, it jumps out as an obvious claim that needs further backing up. But this seems difficult to do. It seems it is easier to adopt a tendency to make the glib association and move on letting it congeal as recieved opinion. This is incredibly surprising to me and very reminiscent of the way climate discussion can skate from denier to holocaust, warming to disaster without a single nuance in-between.
Kieth:
“While I agree with you about the limited value of sock puppetry, when I keep seeing stories like this, I can understand the rationale.”
I am not sure what you mean, what has it got to do with sock puppets?
Do you mean that the story is bogus?
Whatever that story is, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Careful there Keith, you are starting to let your paranoia show into your writing.
sock puppets controlling the debate on CAGW…what a laugh. You might want to use a bit more critical thinking next time.
Much more of this any people will start to suspect that your are ready to join the tinfoil hat brigade.
Hmm, perhaps you ought to read the post more carefully, Ed. Where do I say that sock puppets are “controlling the debate”? I merely said that I suspect that some sock puppets inhabit the polar extremes of the spectrum. Nothing more, nothing less. You find that implausible?
I cannot be sure but this may be a source for the RFE component of the wired piece:
“Maiwandi: Yes brother, we send the news to journalists and global news agencies immediately after it occurs and is posted on the website. We have many email lists to which we distribute news and official statements. These lists include journalists and others concerned with the issue of Afghanistan. We are also active on Facebook and Twitter where we publish the news every day and reach thousands of people. We also daily send news via cell phone text messages to many people.
Al-Somood: Could you please clarify that last sentence? How do you send news to many people via cell phone?
Maiwandi: The news that is posted on the website is converted to SMS messages and sent to a number of people, who send it to other people. Each of them sends it to his acquaintances inside and outside Afghanistan and so a chain of dissemination begins. Each ones tries to spread the news more and more. We have seen many people requesting their friends and relatives to forward the news they receive to at least 20 other people, etc”¦and so this news becomes widely circulated in popular circles. Through the grace of Allah, we have seen many among the general populace rejoice when news reaches them of the victories of the Mujahideen over their enemies.”
No mention of SMS-borne videos just news in the form of texts.
The terms SMS and video don’t sit together very well anyway, and I am not sure that the Afghan network has been upgraded from GSM so sending videos might be fun anyway.
Alex
the easiest way to deal with sockpuppets is for the blog administrators to call them out. After all, they’re the only ones that can see the IP’s of the posters**. To my knowlegde Tim Lambert is the only climate blogger to do this on a fairly regular basis.
Keith, I’m curious if you’ve ever bothered to look at the IPs of posters to see if you’ve got an infestation…sometimes I wonder….
It just occured to me that I may have have, unbidden, badly elliptically paraphrased the finer words of a well known republican, racist president (not sarcastic- he was)
“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”
Keith
“..To which anyone who has ever spent time chatting on blogs will respond: Duh….”
Guardian
“…And of course it isn’t just the US military , as anyone who’s ever been on a Climate Change thread can verify….”
Now…. As the Guardian is a VERY pro CAGW organization, and they know the IP addresses of their posters, they would be the first to supply proof of large numbers of “sock puppets”. As they have not, I am left with the thought that such proof does not exist.
Or do you count as “sock puppet” someone banned by the Guardian for not following the party line and comes back under another ID? Know of several of those….but “sock puppet”?
I expect activists to cry “sock puppet” when confronted with facts contrary to their position, but for someone who considers himself a respectable journalist to infer “sock puppet” without at lest asking for proof as unbecoming.
Ed Forbes
It is the italicised *military* that gives it away..
We don’t have to expend further time to tell them why?
StuartR Says:
March 19th, 2011 at 9:06 pm
Ed Forbes
It is the italicised *military* that gives it away..
Humm….as my comment was on sock puppets on climate blogs as noted by the Guardian and Keith responded in kind, are really saying that the *military* has sock puppets active in the CAGW debate?
As I do not think that this was your intent, perhaps you can be a bit more specific.
Ed Forbes I read your comment and made my point about stickiness.
It was not the *military* side I alluded to but the other associated noun. I.e. the US.
KK puts up this item about a definite hypothesis that the US Military is changing Arab minds with their technology (not, proven or shown see my questions above) . KK shows a passive tendency to nod and wink and just agree without further comment beyond approvingly quoting a comment that says”¦ well, you know the rest?
He quote the “it isn’t just the US military” the *military* part is a qualifier I am not interested in. I am more interested in the US bit. US Scouts? US Girl guides?
What US organisation (governmental?) is doing stuff?
If I am wrong and this simple innuendo is accepted as lovely then I apologise about my intervention here.
BTW the “We don’t have to expend further time to tell them why?”
was slippery of me and I will explain if asked but I meant it sarcastically.
I.E.
Why just quote:
“And of course it isn’t just the US military , as anyone who’s ever been on a Climate Change thread can verify.”
As if it meant anything?
Was that just used as a tool to stick in your mind without offering anything to further justify?
I really don’t think it is sinister I think it is lazy.
I will stick around and answer any question about my statements and thoughts on this.
Stuart,
Ok..I see now where you were going. Sarc does go flat at time. so much of it is tone and body languge that doing good sarc online is hard without a /sarc off statement. Or at least it is for me.
Ed Forbes
I apologise. I like the subject matter talked about here but sometimes when I explicitly ask some things and I get nothing back, I end up being sarcastic. I realise sarcasm/litotes isn’t innately clever, and hides a multitude of sins. But I would rather have that weakness than be a person who assumes other people naturally agree with my stuff without explanation.
I may take up the /sarc identifier more often, but I would almost think my patois was being marginalised 😉