Merriam-Webster defines a sock puppet as a false online identity used for deceptive purposes. [1] Wikipedia's conduct policy — written by a community that has to adjudicate these cases in practice rather than describe them — frames it by what the accounts are for: online identities used for disguised activity by the person operating them. [2]
The claim being made is never in the text. It is in the apparent count of people making it.
Why it works
Against an individual, sockpuppetry does something that volume alone does not. Being told by one person that you are unreasonable is an opinion you can weigh. Being told the same thing by nine accounts in an afternoon is an experience, and it is very hard to hold out against — the effect does not depend on any of them being persuasive, or even on you believing they are separate people. Knowing it is probably one person does surprisingly little to reduce how it feels.
Sockpuppetry vs astroturfing
Sockpuppetry and astroturfing are constantly confused, and the confusion sends you looking for the wrong evidence. Astroturfing conceals whose interest is being served and aims at the readership; sockpuppetry conceals how many people there are and very often aims at you. The two overlap, but neither requires the other: a funded campaign can run entirely on real named people, and one person with three accounts in a forum argument is sockpuppeting nobody's agenda but their own.
Several accounts is not the same as sockpuppetry
The most useful thing in Wikipedia's policy is what it declines to prohibit. Having more than one account is not itself the offence: policies there apply per person rather than per account, so a second account earns its operator no second allowance and no second penalty. [3] The operative test is narrower and better aimed — accounts may not be used on the same page or discussion in a way that suggests they are multiple people. [4]
That distinction matters to anyone reading this page in order to work out whether they are looking at sockpuppetry. The question is not "does this person have another account", which is common and usually innocent. It is whether the accounts are being used to manufacture the appearance of separate people.
There is also a third case, and it is the one most often mistaken for the first. Where real people are recruited into a dispute — including by being asked somewhere else entirely — Wikipedia calls them meatpuppets rather than sockpuppets. [5] They are genuinely separate people with genuinely separate views. Nothing about the account metadata will reveal them, because there is nothing inauthentic about the accounts. If what you are facing is brigading, no amount of looking for one operator will find them, because there is no one operator to find.
Recognising it — and the limits of doing so
Commonly cited signals: accounts created around the same time, thin histories, similar phrasing or rhythm, synchronised arrival, no social graph, interest that does not extend beyond the one dispute.
Two honest caveats.
None of these is proof, and several are ordinary. New accounts exist. Quiet accounts exist. People who read the same sources sound alike. Anyone who has been wrongly accused of running alt accounts will tell you how cheap the accusation is and how impossible it is to disprove.
Be careful with the traditional signals. Older detection advice leaned on things like poor grammar and repetitive phrasing. Those tells were always really about effort — they assume someone producing a lot of text quickly and carelessly — rather than about identity, and this site knows of no measurement of how well they hold up now. That is reasoning rather than a finding, and it is worth saying so on the page most likely to be used to accuse someone. Behaviour and coordination — timing, overlap, what accounts do rather than how they write — are harder to fake, and also genuinely harder to see from inside a conversation.
What to do
Do not accuse. It cannot be proven from where you stand, it is the single most effective way to make yourself look paranoid to onlookers, and if you are wrong you have done to someone else exactly what was being done to you. This is not only this site's view: Wikipedia's own policy warns that directly accusing someone may be counterproductive and will often only inflame the dispute. [6] That is a community which runs a standing investigation process for these cases, advising against the move that feels most natural.
Note what it does not say — that the accusation would be false. It says that making it is the wrong move even when you may be right, which is a different and more uncomfortable piece of advice.
Report the pattern to the platform, which can see account metadata you cannot — here is where to do that, and what a report actually does. Then disengage from the volume — not because silence resolves it, but because replying to nine accounts is a use of your evening with no available win.
Wikipedia's stated approach to an influx of accounts is worth borrowing even where you have no moderator powers: consensus should ideally rest on the points made rather than on the number of people making them. [7] It is written as an aspiration rather than a description of what reliably happens, and it is aimed at people running a discussion rather than people caught in one. But it names the thing sockpuppetry is attacking. If a count of voices is what decides an outcome, manufacturing voices is worth doing; where arguments decide it, the extra accounts have bought their operator nothing.