Accountability & Sock-Puppets: Why This Matters to the Future of the Online Frontier

Accountability online is a tricky thing. The thing that too many people forget, or never realize, is that you are not the label associated with you--your name, handle, or unpronounceable symbol associated with your online identity--and as a consequence you can (and people do) swap out labels as corporations do. Online, this often has the same effect: a change in name often means a reset of identity, unless those following you are willing and able to keep up with your snake-like label-shedding.

This is because those individuals or groups that create the software that run discussion fora, social networks, etc. are either unwilling or unable to implement technical means to prevent users from shedding labels that no longer possess neutral or positive value to said users in favor of assuming one that does. This practice is sometimes called "sock-puppetting", which is not accurate--it properly means using two or more accounts at the same time to give the illusion of agreement or interest where there is none--but is close enough for most usage.

(e.g. "Bob" becomes known as a troll and serial cyber-stalker; "Bob" quits that label and shifts to "Jane", changing apparent behavior to deflect suspicion and shifting methodologies to allow resumption of favored activities without immediate consequence. It should be noted that, as with real-space criminals, most online trouble-makers are nowhere near this savvy- most slip up and out themselves. The few that don't, as with real-space, are the truly dangerous ones that Hollywood loves to write about.)

Truly dedicated trolls, stalkers, etc. can and will use sock-puppets in a malicious way. That method is meant to overwhelm a user's ability to block/ignore other users, as this takes the form of a virtual gang-stalking, which works well when a target is also hit with gas-lighting attacks to drive the target to insanity or death.

For now, the tools that administrators and moderators have to deal with individuals who use sock-puppets to get around accountability are often quite few. Most can do no more than compare the logs of IP addresses incoming to their site of concern against the logs of user accounts, encourage users to submit abuse reports to them, and wait for the aggressor to do something.

That something is either a violation of the user agreement (which, to be fair, often results in the offender switch socks and little more) or violates a criminal statute in a manner that demands prompt action. (This is difficult in large part due to the conflicting jurisdictions of real-space; the victim is in one place, the accused in another, and the scene of the crime in a third place in terms of real-space. Within a nation-state it's confusing; across those lines, it becomes much harder for justice to be had.)

Various governments and international organizations propose various solutions, none of which are politically acceptable to all of the key players in the international system, but all of them are doing the one thing that will result in a solution: they are focusing not on human solutions, but technical ones- they are focusing upon means by which common users simply cannot sever the connection between themselves and what online labels they go by as they can (and do) now.

The problem is that this is not a problem that governments or similar institutions can solve. Much like alcoholism, this problem can't be effectively remedied through criminalization and brute-force leg-breaking (i.e. Prohibition and the War On (Some) Drugs). What works is a combination of instructing users as to how the technology of the Internet works, instructing them on the psychology of both the offenders and of the offenses, and then synthesizing the two subjects together in a demonstration of how to apply the latter through the former to shut down the offenders and filter them out of one's life.

In other words, how frontier cultures deal with frontier dilemmas: by helping others to help themselves, and then working together to handle our own problems effectively, without the need to call upon something outside the community to do it for us.

The real-space frontiers closed because too many people, too long accustomed to having a Big Daddy figure do the dirty work, called for that figure to handle this work instead of doing it themselves. (There's a euphemism and symbol for this sort of mentality: White Picket Fences.) If we want the Internet, and its potential, to be open and free for generations to come then we must accept that a frontier milieu demands a frontier approach to problems: we must do it ourselves.

And, as this is the Internet, doing for ourselves is not only viable- it's easy. The knowledge we need to comprehend and master these technologies is at our fingertips- we need only ask just one knowledgeable search expert what to search for and where to look. Once found, we can link to it (if linkable) or send copies of it (if not); we follow up, implement measures (and keep doing it until it works), and then--once we confirm it's dealt with--we get on with having fun with our lives.

We need not call upon things that are increasingly obsolete in this networked society we live in; we should, instead, make use of it- we route around the trouble-makers by cutting them out of the network. The sock-puppet problem with regards to accountability online, while a problem here and now, won't be for much longer- and we need not let Orwellian (or Huxleyan) methods favored by Too Big To Fail governments and private institutions infantilize us in search for security either. We're capable of handling this ourselves, so we should. Our posterity demands it.