Business promotion In 2007, the CEO of
Whole Foods,
John Mackey, was discovered to have posted as "Rahodeb" on the
Yahoo! Finance Message Board, extolling his own company and predicting a dire future for its rival,
Wild Oats Markets, while concealing his relationship to both companies. Whole Foods argued that none of Mackey's actions broke the law. During the 2007 trial of
Conrad Black, chief executive of
Hollinger International, prosecutors alleged that he had posted messages on a Yahoo! Finance chat room using the name "nspector", attacking
short sellers and blaming them for his company's stock performance. Prosecutors provided evidence of these postings in
Black's criminal trial, where he was convicted of mail fraud and obstruction. The postings were raised at multiple points in the trial. During a panel discussion at a British Crime Writers Festival in 2012, author
Stephen Leather admitted using pseudonyms to praise his own books, claiming that "everyone does it". He spoke of building a "network of characters", some operated by his friends, who discussed his books and had conversations with him directly. The same year, after he was pressured by the spy novelist
Jeremy Duns on Twitter, who had detected possible indications online, UK crime fiction writer
R.J. Ellory admitted having used a pseudonymous account name to write a positive review for each of his own novels, and additionally a negative review for two other authors.
David Manning was a fictitious
film critic, created by a marketing executive working for
Sony Corporation to give consistently good reviews for releases from Sony subsidiary
Columbia Pictures, which could then be quoted in promotional material.
Blog commentary American reporter
Michael Hiltzik was temporarily suspended from posting to his blog, "The Golden State", on the
Los Angeles Times website after he admitted "posting there, as well as on other sites, under false names." He used the pseudonyms to attack conservatives such as
Hugh Hewitt and L.A. prosecutor Patrick Frey—who eventually exposed him. Hiltzik's blog at the
LA Times was the newspaper's first blog. While suspended from blogging, Hiltzik continued to write regularly for the newspaper.
Lee Siegel, a writer for
The New Republic magazine, was suspended for defending his articles and blog comments under the username "
Sprezzatura". In one such comment, "Sprezzatura" defended Siegel's bad reviews of
Jon Stewart: "Siegel is brave, brilliant and wittier than Stewart will ever be."
Government sockpuppetry As an example of
state-sponsored Internet sockpuppetry, in 2011, a US company called
Ntrepid was awarded a $2.76 million contract from
U.S. Central Command for "online persona management" operations to create "fake online personas to influence net conversations and spread U.S. propaganda" in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Pashto as part of
Operation Earnest Voice. On September 11, 2014, a number of sockpuppet accounts reported an explosion at a chemical plant in Louisiana. The reports came on a range of media, including Twitter and YouTube, but U.S. authorities claimed the entire event to be a hoax. The information was determined by many to have originated with a Russian government-sponsored sockpuppet management office in Saint Petersburg, called the
Internet Research Agency. Russia was again implicated by the U.S. intelligence community in 2016 for hiring trolls in the
2016 United States presidential election. The
Institute of Economic Affairs claimed in a 2012 paper that the United Kingdom government and the European Union fund charities that campaign and lobby for causes the government supports. In one example, 73% of responses to a government consultation were the direct result of campaigns by alleged "sockpuppet" organizations. ==See also== •
Catfishing •
Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia •
On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog •
Passing (sociology) •
Phishing •
Reputation •
Review bomb •
Shill •
Team Jorge •
Trojan Horse •
Twinking/smurfing (video games) ==References==