the US government is running a large ring of puppet accounts as part of Operation Earnest Voice (OEV)--a practice commonly called “astroturfing”... Operation E

the US government is running a large ring of puppet accounts as part of Operation Earnest Voice (OEV)--a practice commonly called “astroturfing”... Operation Earnest voice is built to allow 50 real users to manage 10 fake accounts each. These 500 accounts appear to be from anywhere in the world they user would like, “replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographically consistent.” What it does, effectively, is create a network of online personas that, when working in a coordinated fashion, can control the tone and direction of just about any online conversation. This brings to light an important consideration about the current state of social media and whether or not these massive social networks are really the answer - could be argued that it is better to be apart of smaller-scale, referral based, private networks where there is less likely to be 'infiltrations' of the variety stated here. Unfortunately, I suspect, that HN is no exception to a program like OEV.