one such comment, "Sprezzatura" defended Siegel's bad reviews of Jon Stewart: "Siegel is brave, brilliant and wittier than Stewart will ever be." Politically oriented In late November 2020, TYT Network reported an example of a white male Republican Trump voter having a sockpuppet Twitter account presented as that of a black gay man, criticizing Biden and praising Trump while systematically emphasizing his race and sexual orientation. Additionally, in October of 2020, Clemson University social media researcher identified "more than two dozen of Twitter accounts claiming to be black Trump supporters who gained hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets in a span of just a few days, sparking major doubts about their identities," many using photos of black men from news reports or stock images "including one in which the text 'black man photo' was still watermarked on the image". Government sockpuppetry As an example of state-sponsored Internet sockpuppetry, in 2011, a US company called Ntrepid was awarded a $2.76 million contract from U.S. Central Command for "online persona management" operations to create "fake online personas to influence net conversations and spread U.S. propaganda" in Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Pashto as part of Operation Earnest Voice. On 11 September 2014, a number of sockpuppet accounts reported an explosion at a chemical plant in Louisiana. The reports came on a range of media, including Twitter and YouTube, but U.S. authorities claimed the entire event to be a hoax. The information was determined by many to have originated with a Russian government-sponsored sockpuppet management office in Saint Petersburg, called the Internet Research Agency. Russia was again implicated by the U.S. intelligence community in 2016 for hiring trolls in the 2016 United States presidential election. The Institute of Economic Affairs claimed in a 2012 paper that the United Kingdom government and the European Union fund charities that campaign and lobby for causes the government supports. In one example, 73% of responses to a government consultation was the direct result of campaigns by alleged "sockpuppet" organizations. See also Catfishing Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog Passing (sociology) Phishing Reputation Shill Team Jorge Trojan Horse References External links Sock puppet at The Jargon File Internet terminology Internet trolling Internet manipulation and propaganda Deception