Well the article does talk about that. And there are plenty of bot posters out there as well, they were quite notorious in manipulating stock prices. Terminolo

Well the article does talk about that. And there are plenty of bot posters out there as well, they were quite notorious in manipulating stock prices. Terminology note - sockpuppet is a Persona that is created to back up the opinions of second Persona. The general term here seems to be Persona, of which sockpuppet is a specific kind of Persona.