Sockpuppetry—using false identities for deception—is centuries old, but the advent of the web has made creating sockpuppets, and falling for their tricks, easier than ever before.

We can’t physically meet most of the people we interact with on the internet. So we create avatars who represent us in the online world, personae that are designed—on some level, conscious or subconscious—to shape others’ ideas about who we really are. Indeed, it’s natural for us to create avatars that represent what we want to be rather than what we are. And it’s only a short step from there to manipulating others’ perceptions of us to give ourselves an advantage of some sort, to deceive. To become puppet masters.

The Daring Political Rebel Who Was Not What She Seemed

Take Amina Arraf. She was a 35-year-old Syrian American who had become a prominent blogger. Her blog, Gay Girl in Damascus, described life in Syria during the beginning of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad. Liberal and lesbian, she was in a precarious position as a protester in a conservative and unstable society. She kept writing, and in May, The Guardian dubbed her “an unlikely hero of revolt in a conservative country.”

Excerpted from Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It’s True?

But in the early evening of Monday, June 6, 2011, she was walking to meet a friend in downtown Damascus when three young men wrestled her into a red minivan, which screeched off into the dusk. Arraf’s cousin posted details to Amina’s blog. The outcry was immediate. The Guardian reported the kidnapping, and so did the New York Times, Fox News, Gawker, CNN, and several other news organizations. The International Business Times asked how the United States should respond to the abduction, and “Free Amina” websites and posters began to spring up.

Within a few hours, though, Andy Carvin, an NPR journalist, noted on Twitter that none of the people who had ever interviewed Arraf had met her or even spoken to her over the phone. Once someone began to question Arraf’s identity, the illusion shattered. By the morning of June 8, the Wall Street Journal had discovered that photos purportedly of Arraf were, in fact, snapshots of a woman living in London. Shortly thereafter, a website in communication with Arraf was able to show that her computer was in Scotland. Soon it became clear that Arraf wasn’t a “she” at all. She was the creation of Tom MacMaster, a Ph.D. student at the University of Edinburgh.

Everything about Arraf was completely made up—MacMaster had created Arraf’s Facebook page, her Twitter account, her email address—and had conducted interviews with numerous journalists in her name. Why? It was a matter of authority. MacMaster had some very strong views on Middle Eastern affairs, so he created Amina Arraf to give his ideas credibility.

Tom MacMaster’s Amina Arraf is fairly typical of one kind of false persona: what I call “Type 1” sockpuppetry. In Type 1 sockpuppetry, the puppet master fabricates a phony persona who has a specific attribute or experience that the puppet master himself lacks—an attribute or experience that gives the puppet master extra authority in a conversation or extra ability to generate a reaction from others. In all cases, the point seems to be to seek either authority, attention, or profit.

A Wonderland for Pathological Liars and Attention Whores

Debbie Swenson was after attention when she created a Type 1 sockpuppet, a fictitious teenage girl named Kaycee Nicole, in 1999. In a blog she called Living Colours, Kaycee described in detail the ups and downs of her battle with leukemia, which attracted a great deal of attention and sympathy.

When Kaycee finally died on May 14, 2001, the outpouring of grief from her online fans was real and palpable. Denizen after denizen of the popular website MetaFilter expressed heartbreak.

>As sleuths started picking apart the story, some believers suffered genuine anguish because of the cynicism.

Then, on May 19, the user “acridrabbit” posted a simple question: “Is it possible that Kaycee did not exist?” Not only were there some inconsistencies in Kaycee’s story—some odd-sounding descriptions of how the doctors talked about leukemia, the difficulty people were having in finding an address for flowers and cards—but it also appeared that nobody had ever met Kaycee in person.

Immediately, some MetaFilter sleuths started picking apart the story, even as Kaycee believers, like “bwg,” appeared to suffer genuine anguish because of the cynicism: "STOP! STOP!! STOP!!! this is deplorable. it’s making me sick to my stomach! i have spoken to kaycee on the phone, as well as her mother, numerous times. i can assure you kaycee was quite real." But the truth was that Kaycee simply didn’t exist. Debbie Swenson admitted the next day that Kaycee had been a fabrication.

Stories like Kaycee’s are surprisingly common, to the point that psychiatrists and psychologists have started noticing a pattern—a syndrome that’s now called “virtual factitious disorder” or, more snappily, “Munchausen by internet.” In the syndrome someone creates an online persona who suffers some kind of tragedy and milks the resulting outpouring of sympathy and concern. It’s almost guaranteed to cause a big stir, so it becomes irresistible to the extreme attention seeker. Any sufficiently large online community will encounter one of these sooner or later.

How to Destroy Your Enemies and Look Good Doing It

More common than Type 1 sockpuppetry is Type 2 sockpuppetry, in which the only one thing that matters is that the the fictional personality must be someone other than the puppet master. Type 2 sockpuppets are often deployed as reinforcements in an online feud.

Because these sockpuppets are meant to seem independent of the puppet master, these false personae give the impression of a group of online people who agree with and bolster the puppet master’s position—or attack his enemies.

John Lott, a gun researcher, created a fake student who defended his writing online and gave him positive reviews on Amazon.com. (Bing Liu, a computer scientist who studied Amazon reviews, told The New York Times that approximately a third of reviews on the internet were likely fake. These are either created by sockpuppets or purchased wholesale.)

>The internet has become a battlefield for virtual personalities—all attempting to gather information to help their causes and hurt their enemies.

Mystery writer R. J. Ellory used a brigade of sockpuppets not only to give his own books glowing reviews, but also to depress his rivals’ ratings. Professor Orlando Figes, an esteemed British historian, lost much of that esteem by doing precisely the same thing, and in a legal settlement Figes apologized and agreed to pay his rivals’ legal bills.

The Type 2 sockpuppet is an easy weapon for an online skirmisher with a fragile ego. It’s also a great sales booster for a company that wants to tinker with its online reviews. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that these are the only people who deploy sockpuppets. In fact, sockpuppets are now being used for intelligence and for defense.

We're All Caught Up in a Sockpuppet Cyberwar

Social media sites often reveal more information about you to your friends or followers than they do to the general public. This means that people who have an interest in knowing something about you have a vested interest in trying to get you to invite them into your inner circle.

In 2012, Raymond Kelly, commissioner of the New York City Police Department, declared that officers could create false identities to hang out on social media sites in hopes of spotting crime. Police have been using similar tricks for years—impersonating underage children on the internet, for example, in hopes of catching pedophiles—but the ease of creating a large number of sockpuppets for the express purpose of infiltrating social media sites is making civil libertarians nervous.

>China has acquired a reputation for gathering information on its enemies and rivals through sockpuppeteering. But it’s not the only state in the sockpuppet game.

Some sockpuppets have even bigger targets. In March 2012, unknown parties repeatedly tried to get sensitive information about NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, Admiral James Stavridis, by impersonating him on Facebook and insinuating themselves into his circle of friends and colleagues. NATO sources said they didn’t know who was responsible, but other experts suggested that the culprit may have been China.

China has acquired a reputation—probably justly—for gathering information on its enemies and rivals through sockpuppeteering and other underhanded internet tricks. But it’s not the only state in the sockpuppet game. The U.S. is in it, too.

In late 2010 or early 2011, the United States Central Command (Centcom)—the branch of the military responsible for operations in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Middle East—signed a $2.76 million contract with Ntrepid, a California company, to provide the ultimate sockpuppeteering software. According to the original proposal, Centcom was looking for a software suite that would allow 50 users to create 10 sockpuppets each, “replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly [sic] consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries.”

The internet has become a battlefield for virtual personalities—sockpuppets all attempting to gather information and using that information to help their causes and hurt their enemies. It’s a war without bystanders, for we’re all caught up in the fighting, whether we’re aware of it or not.

Excerpted from Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It’s True? by Charles Seife. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC. Copyright © 2014 by Charles Seife.

Editor: Samantha Oltman (@samoltman)