Internet's 'sock puppets' are threatened species
Lawsuits grow comments on message boards

For years, everyone from CEOs to everyday Joes thought they could sign on to these low-tech sites with an invented name or just be anonymous to diss their nemeses, never for a moment worrying they might be nabbed for libel or corporate skullduggery.

But these days, the sock puppet is a threatened species.

[...]

Publius was the sock puppet for Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and other founding fathers who called for the ratification of the United States constitution in the documents known as the Federalist Papers. When they were published in journals in the 1780s, they were an invaluable, elegant act of political dissent.

Centuries later, message boards and interactive encyclopedic Web sites such as Wikipedia could be the venue for this kind of watershed material -- and some damaging schlock, too.

[...]
Vancouver businessman Wayne Crookes, a former Green Party of Canada campaign manager, filed a suit last April in the British Columbia Supreme Court against Wikipedia for what he believes were disparaging and damaging comments made by a writer last year with the handle "indyperson." The sock puppet was repeating comments made by anonymous authors on Blogspot's The Compost Heap. Google, which hosts the Web site, and the bloggers, were named in a separate suit. Mr. Crookes would like Google to identify the authors and remove the contentious words that exposed him "to ridicule and contempt."