“Emotional strip-mining”: Sympathy sockpuppets in online communities

Sympathy sockpuppets are false online identities used for purposes of extracting care work from others. While online community infiltration for nefarious purposes is a well-documented phenomenon, people may also join online communities using deceptive personas (“sockpuppet” accounts) for non-nefarious reasons, such as to gain sympathy or cultivate a sense of belonging in a group. In comparison with scamming and trolling, this more subtle form of online deception is not well understood, and to date, its impacts on individuals and communities have not been fully articulated. This knowledge gap leaves communities without guidance when managing the impacts of this sympathy sockpuppet deception. We interviewed people who had been members of online communities that discovered sympathy sockpuppets in their midst to explore and characterize the phenomenon of sympathy sockpuppetry and to provide guidance for other individuals and communities that encounter similar forms of online deception.

Who sells knowledge online? An exploratory study of knowledge celebrities in China

PurposeThis study explores identity signaling used by an emerging class of knowledge celebrities in China – Knowledge Wanghong – who sell knowledge products on online platforms. Because identity signaling may involve constructing unique online identities and controlling over product-related and seller-related characteristics, the purpose of this study is two-fold: (1) to uncover different online identities of knowledge celebrities; and (2) to examine the extent to which the online identity type is associated with their product-related characteristics, seller-related characteristics and sales performance.Design/methodology/approachA unique data set was collected from a Chinese leading pay-for-knowledge platform – Zhihu – which featured the online profiles of tens of thousands of knowledge celebrities. Online identity types were derived from their self-edited content using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling. Thereafter, their product-related characteristics, seller-related characteristics and respective sales performance were analyzed across different identity types using analysis of variance (ANOVA) and multiple-group linear regression.FindingsKnowledge celebrities are clustered into four distinctive online identities: Mentor, Broker, Storyteller and Geek. Product-related characteristics, sell-related characteristics and sales performance varied across four different identities. Additionally, the online identity type moderated the relationships among their product-related characteristics, sell-related characteristics and sales performance.Originality/valueAs emerging-phenomenon-based research, this study extends related literature by using the notion of identity signaling to analyze a peculiar group of online celebrities who are setting an important trend in the pay-for-knowledge model in China.

Situational selves of online identity and rationality in choosing – More examples of the college students’ online identity in China

The Internet has provided a new context for the exploration of the concept of identity. Different identities were expressed on different online settings, which indicates the feature of ‘situational selves’ of online identities. By comparing the differences among WeChat identity, Weibo identity and offline identity, more examples were introduced not only to explain ‘situational selves’, but also the ‘rationality’ in choosing among different online identities.

VISUAL ESSAY: The Auteur and The Personal Comic: A Reconstruction of Online Identities

When comic artist creates a personal comic, whose identities portrayed in the comic? Himself or his reconstructed image? More so, when the comic is published in social media, many viewers presumed that the comic is a mirror of the auteur life itself. This is where the constructed identities and real identities is reconstructed: negotiated, blurred between fiction and non-fiction.