Wikipedia:Sock farming

Sock farming is a type of abuse against the Wikimedia community and projects in which a bad actor creates many sock puppets, develops each of them with an editing history, reserves them in anticipation of later misconduct, then deploys them as semi-disposable accounts for some bad purpose. As an example, these accounts might be sold to do undisclosed paid editing or troll a serious community discussion.

Historically sock puppets existed in small numbers as developed by human labor. As machine learning techniques became easier to deploy, sock farming became easier with automatic techniques to create accounts which are mostly automated but pass the Turing test for the growth phase of the fake account life cycle.

Life cycle

1. account creation
   1. Bad actor creates many user accounts as a cohort
   2. Older accounts might be better because they seem more genuine
2. growth phase
   1. accounts have to make edits to seem human and genuine
   2. automated processes, like grammar and spell checking, seem positive and useful but may be machines
3. deployment phase
   1. in the black market, bad actors buy and sell Wikimedia accounts
   2. someone planning misconduct buys an account from a farm
4. misconduct phase
   1. the account is presented as a human who is genuine and merits respect
   2. expecting the assumption of good faith, the bad actor operates the farmed account to do misconduct

Detection of farmed accounts

Various machine learning projects are identifying what seem to be clusters of sock farmed accounts.

Sock-farmed accounts have behavior which differs from the activity of typical Wikimedia editors.