The use of software to automate the deployment of armies of fake social media accounts is, to me, the most disturbing trend in the social space. It’s disturbing on its face but even moreso because public affairs organizations are among the most likely to supply these services. And few would be surprised to find PR practitioners behind such dubious efforts.

I don’t personally know a single public relations practitioner who would support such a tactic. But it’s a big industry that requires no licensing and is bound by few regulations. That makes it easy for those who are lazy, corrupt, unprofessional or just downright evil to make big money from clients looking for quick results without regard to the means by which they were achieved.

There’s nothing new about sockpuppets, the term used to define an identity used to bamboozle people online. These could be completely fake identities, although the term is also applied to real people who get paid to post disingenuous reviews and ratings of products and services.

But the new trend takes the concept to new depths.

I reported this morning on For Immediate Release about the first story to cross my feeds. This involves HB Gary Federal. As near as I can figure, HBGary Federal sells its the company’s products to the federal government while HB Gary sells to other clients (such as computer forensic investigators and computer emergency response teams).

HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr was bragged that his company was tracking down the real identities of members of the hacker group Anonymous. As the CEO of a computer security company, he probably felt he was doing so with impunity. Instead, Anonymous broke into HBGary’s network—even the phone system, according to some accounts. From the gold mine of data the hackers took, they have so far released only emails.

Fifty thousand of them.

Some of these emails contain the smoking gun for the abuse outlined above. In partular, the left-leaning Daily Kos reports that a Microsoft Word attachment to an email describes the “persona management” software that allows a small group to look like a much larger group; the small team can then automate certain activities so a single persona can look more like an uprising. Here’s an excerpt from the Word file:

Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona. For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use.

Barr goes on to explain that his company will establish a set of personas on a variety of sites that don’t require evidence that you’re a real person—Twitter, blogs, forums, Google Buzz and MySpace, for example. The accounts are maintained through RSS feeds, retweets and “linking together social media commenting between platforms.” Then, using these accounts, it’s a small step to creating Facebook and LinkedIn profiles; these services do restrict real people to only a single account. Barr also says the accounts would automatically be locked down and linked “to a selected number of previously created accounts, automatically pre-aging the real accounts.”

Another leaked Word document explains how all this would work:

Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona. In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags. 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.

Re-reading that statement made me throw up a little in my mouth.

At the Daily Kos, the concern is that such practices will be employed by right-leaning institutions against “labor unions, progressive organizations, journalists, and progressive bloggers.” As for me, I don’t care who uses it against whom. Manipulating consensus is wrong, unethical, unprofessional and the very antitheses of the transparency and responsibility that are at the heart of the changes sweeping business today.

And, of course, when it’s uncovered (and it will be uncovered), the blame will fall at the PR profession’s feet. As The Kos article so bluntly put it, “This is just one little company of assholes. I can’t believe there aren’t others doing this already. From oil companies, political campaigns, PR firms, you name it. Public opinion means big bucks. And let’s face it, what these guys are talking about is easy.”

Make no mistake. 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.

Lest you think that the companies engaged in these devious practices are shrewd enough to get away with it, consider that shortly after reporting the HB Gary story this morning, I came upon a post that reveals the U.S. Air Force is looking for just such capabilities. ccording to Erik Sherman, writing on his AB|Net Wired In blog, “The U.S. military is looking for software and services to manage upwards of 500 fake online personas designed to interact with social media, presumably including such sites as Facebook and Twitter.”

The request is part of an Air Force document currently available to anyone who wants to see it in the government’s contract database. Sherman’s interpretation of the service the Air Force seeks would be used to “create and control fictitious online identities, with up to 50 users controlling as many as 10 identities each. Each identity could use social media sites and other online services, giving the impression of an individual but really being a false face for the military.”

Sherman notes that HBGary Federal is one of the companies pursuing the Air Force contract.

The goal may well be to influence public opinion, but it runs completely counter to the approach taken by the Army, under the auspices of a year-old directive from Defense Secretary Gates, that calls for more authenticity and transparency through engagement in social channels, not a blatant gaming of the system. Seriously, doesn’t the Air Force have enough engaged personnel to be themselves in social channels while helping to tell the Air Force’s story? Getting caught in one of these schemes could cause irreperable damage; it would be years before most people trusted anything they heard about the Air Force.

(But then again, the Air Force is the branch of the U.S. military that ordered staff to not visit any site containing WikiLeaks documents, one of the stupidest orders in recent memory, since the spouses, children, friends and neighbors of those same personnel could peruse those same documents without any restricting at all.)

So far, the organizations that represent the public relations profession have been only moderately visible when it comes to situations like these. They point to their codes of ethics as evidence that they are, of course, opposed to such behavior.

But as these practices spin out of control, these organizations need to do more. I would like to see an industry-wide effort that condemns these practices and those who are behind them. That condemnation needs to be loud and repeated often.

If you belong to a PR association—IABC, PRSA, CPRS or any other, write them, tweet them, call them, hell, write a letter or send smoke signals. But let them know that you expect them to represent the profession based on the ethics that guide you in your work and to denounce these practices as unacceptable. I wouldn’t mind seeing memberships of organizations caught using these tactics revoked.

If we can’t get rid of the bottom-feeders who use these tools, the least we can do is marginalize them.