Strategies used by sock puppet / fake social media accounts to disrupt

by loopzdaloop 30.12.17 12:01

Hello,
Over the years, incidents of 'pro-mccann' social media accounts were observed to have been set up across various digital media forums. In part, this was the Brain child of Alex Woolfall - who famously claimed that he would 'teach the Mccann's everything he knew' about 'cognitive infiltration of forums'. Infamously, there were accounts on websites such as digitalspy or tiwtter where people could be observed to be following shift patterns - logging on / off to disrupt discussion on internet forums.A number of years back, even on this forum you could still see people triggered by particular 'words' or 'avenues' of discussion that these PR companies wished to shut down. Raising the issue of the 'dogs' was one of them. I assume their money has run out as it's not as prevalent as it used to be. However, I think it still occurs on the #Mccann hashtag on twitter.

Today Wikileaks has published a talk/presentation by 'hacktivists' who gained access to the secret documents of the government departments (including the UK) who run similar 'sock puppet' / 'bot' type accounts to disrupt social media.
It's a really interesting talk and lists all the strategies that will have been used by these public relations organisations against web forums such a sthis.

Once you know the strategies they use, it can help identify them and reduce their power to disrupt.
The link to the video is here: https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9233-uncovering_british_spies_web_of_sockpuppet_social_media_personas#t=1146

The intro is a bit slow, but it gets good!

by plebgate 30.12.17 12:08

I always look out for user names with inititals MW on this site. I am convinced that initials were a ploy used to identify the "pros" for a while until we cottoned on to it.

by Mark Willis 30.12.17 13:14

plebgate wrote:I always look out for user names with inititals MW on this site. I am convinced that initials were a ploy used to identify the "pros" for a while until we cottoned on to it.

Ahem...