Battle of the Sockpuppets: Part of the Discussion at Media140 Brisbane

The Media140 conferences ran in Brisbane, Sydney, London, and Barcelona between 2009 and 2012 as one of the first dedicated journalism-meets-social-media circuits, drawing reporters, agency communications staff, platform representatives, and the early academic researchers studying online identity. Sockpuppetry — coordinated inauthentic accounts presenting themselves as ordinary citizens — had become a pressing topic in early 2011 because of the HBGary Federal email leak that February, which exposed contractor proposals for tooling specifically designed to manage networks of fake personas at scale.

Australian government communications staff at Media140 Brisbane that April were navigating a particular variant of the problem: sockpuppet accounts impersonating agency officials, sockpuppets aggregating on contested policy topics like the carbon tax, and the question of what platforms (then Twitter and Facebook) were prepared to do at agency request. Craig Thomler, the Australian Government 2.0 commentator and former Department of Health communications adviser, was a regular voice in these conversations.

The framework that emerged — distinguishing between policy-permissible anonymity, deception with attribution claims, and coordinated platform manipulation — turned out to be more durable than the conferences themselves. The same distinctions resurfaced in the 2017–2018 IRA-disclosure conversations, in platform integrity policies after 2020, and in the academic literature on coordinated inauthentic behaviour.