Douglas Rushkoff has come up with the term “Sock Mobs” to describe the gangs of bogus commenters (who are often just one person) who swarm on comment threads:
There’s a relatively new phenomenon occurring online these days - an illusion of populist group hostilitiy I’ve come to call “Sock Mobs,” after the “sock puppets” people use to feign multiple identities in online conversations. It works like this:
An anonymous poster picks a fight with his presumed enemy. Whether or not that enemy responds, a number of other posters appear to chime in - agreeing to whatever the accusation might be. “This guy is a commie.” “This doctor is a quack.” “This guy wants Israel to be abolished.” “This professor is corrupting college students.” The accusation comes along with twisted supporting evidence. Every once in a while, an underinformed but real person agrees with the accusations; after all, it appears from the posts that this enemy of all things good and proper really might be a threat. All this makes it look like there’s a lot of upset people.
The accused party might respond, explain, and clarify, but the original poster always ignores the facts presented and reframes the argument to his liking - always polarizing, exaggerating, or even misquoting the defendee. Then, again, all those voices of agreement pile on. Eventually, the defendee goes away - having said pretty much all he or she can say - and the original anonymous angry poster claims victory: see? the accused can’t have an open discussion because he is guilty.
It turns out, however, that many of these “gangs” of seemingly unrelated, individual posters are just one person. In most cases, it’s a shill of a lobby, a “campus protection” organization, or an offshoot of a political party. He logs in from multiple computers, spoofs IP addresses, and sometimes even fakes responses by his target. All in an effort to make it appear that a real grassroots mob of regular folk are taking a stand against the evil communist, market critic, or God-hating evolutionist. College students are hired to troll message boards and engage in this behavior. Of course in other cases it’s just a lonely, obsessed, anti-fan.
Douglas Rushkoff has come up with the term “Sock Mobs” to describe the gangs of bogus commenters (who are often just one person) who swarm on comment threads:
There’s a relatively new phenomenon occurring online these days - an illusion of populist group hostilitiy I’ve come to call “Sock Mobs,” after the “sock puppets” people use [...]
