"Persona management": how automated fake profiles threaten the heart of online community
There’s a reason social media analysts and practitioners harp so much on authenticity: it’s one of the underpinnings of the “social” in “social media”.
Online community works because of our relationships with each other; those relationships can only happen when you feel as though you know the person you’re dealing with. Not everything or even most things about the person, but something true… and something significant enough to let you build a certain level of trust. Discover the other person has misled you about who they are or about their motives, and trust dies.
That’s why organizations take such a public beating when they engage in astroturfing, or sock-puppeting, or other forms of online deception (or a lack of transparency so egregious as to amount to the same thing). Sony, Wal-Mart, AT&T, Whole Foods and McDonalds—all large brands led by people who should know better—have all succumbed to the temptation to forge conversations that weren’t happening organically.
Still, that temptation will probably always be there… as will agencies willing to help you indulge your ethical lapses. Some will even brag about it. They’ll cloak their activities in dispassionate terminology, and kid themselves that they’re being clever, but it comes down to lying.
One term for this kind of online deception is persona management. It’s been around for a while, but came to light in a Daily Kos blog post after security firm HBGary Federal boasted about infiltrating Anonymous, the loosely affiliated group of online activists who recently gained prominence for their activities in support of WikiLeaks.
Members of Anonymous then released emails hacked from HBGary servers that detail a wide range of unethical practices. One of them is persona management: tying together a large number of fake social media accounts with content fed both manually and through RSS, and then managing them with software that helps you keep them distinct and internally consistent (so that Rose from Abbotsford doesn’t accidentally post as Kumar from San Diego).
Here’s one of the most chilling passages from that data dump:
In fact using hashtags and gaming some location-based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example. There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas.
In other words, that very-convincing LinkedIn invitation you received from someone who said they met you at a conference a few months ago may or may not be from a real person.
There’s a huge difference of scale between, say, the Whole Foods CEO posting to Yahoo! message boards under an assumed name and creating an army of at-least-superficially-convincing online presences to be wielded at will against opposing organizations, ideas or individuals.
And there are countless reasons to be appalled by the idea. Shel Holtz, for example, points out the enormous reputational risk to a sockpuppeting organization if this kind of ploy is exposed; worse, “if this gets more common, your honest, transparent communication efforts will be just as suspect as those of the actual bad actors. It threatens to undermine the credibility of every organization participating in the social space.”
But it isn’t just organizational credibility that’s on the line. “Persona management” doesn’t create fake organizations; it aims to create convincing fake people. And when people know that some of the individuals they’re dealing with online are fictitious, it raises the possibility that everyone else might be, too (at least, those they don’t also know from the offline world).
If there’s anything the Internet doesn’t need, it’s yet another reason to dismiss views and perspectives that differ from our own. You’ll already find plenty of contentious conversations where antagonists question each others’ motives and honesty; the HBGarys of the world are pouring gasoline on that fire.
At least now we know what they’re up to. And perhaps there can be something good to come out of it. As the writer of that DailyKos blog post put it, “Maybe this whole thing will be liberating. Maybe people will develop stronger spines and not be so easily swayed by raving mobs.”
Maybe. But we’ll pay a heavy price in trust and social capital along the way.
