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January 16, 2007

Sock Mobs/Bots

On the Internet, or at least in many places online, nobody knows you've replicated (or how many times). I could create an unruly mob of respondents supporting (or even disagreeing with) my blog posts, for instance, by altering my identity from post to post. I could do that on your blog, too.

Doug Rushkoff calls this a "sock mob" phemenon, derived from "sock puppet," which Jamais Cascio defines as "a faux personage used in online debates to back up the arguments of the real person (thereby demonstrating the position to be popular)." The mob is the plural of the puppet, and I suspect they're popping up in quite a few places, especially where the subject is politics. Jamais posts that we can expect to see much more of this sort of thing. [Link]

As the scripting and construction tools for these virtual worlds get more powerful, we're likely to see virtual protesters run by real people augmented by mobs of in-game simulations and "bots," made with enough detail in both image and behavior to convincingly appear as a swarm of real players. They may have scripted replies to questions, and would be coded to appear and disappear in the same way that human-operated denizens of the virtual worlds do. It wouldn't be hard to figure out that they were bots if you pay enough attention, but as a mob -- especially if human-operated figures were dispersed throughout -- they'd be rather impressive.

Ultimately, just as rampant sock mob activities can devalue conversation and comments, sock bots will no doubt in time make it harder to engage in political activity in virtual worlds. If a political figure knew that her very appearance in a virtual world setting would trigger the appearance of dozens or even hundreds of marching, chanting protesters -- who look at least as "real" as the human-operated purple monkeys, giant phalluses with hands, flying unicorns and the like that inhabit the virtual environments -- said political figure would likely find little to gain by making that appearance.

This is why we need a netwide standard identity framework with strong and meaningful authentication. We won't necessarily get it, but people are working on it.)

jon posted this at 7:33 PM
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