bite of the sock puppet

from: Sock Puppet Bites Man

...One of the joys of the Internet age is the great new lingo it is producing. To “flame wars” and “phishing” we can now add “sock puppet.” A sock puppet, for those still boning up, is a false identity through which a member of an Internet community speaks while pretending not to, like a puppeteer manipulating a hand puppet. Recently, a senior editor at The New Republic got in trouble for some particularly colorful sock puppetry.

When Lee Siegel began blogging for The New Republic, he found, as many others have, that Internet posters tend to be fairly outspoken — and a good number of the posters on the blog were harshly critical. An exception was “sprezzatura,” who regularly offered extravagant praise. After Mr. Siegel was criticized for his writing about Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show,” sprezzatura wrote: “Siegel is brave, brilliant and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep.” A reader charged that sprezzatura was in fact Mr. Siegel, but sprezzatura denied it.

The reader turned out to be right. When The New Republic’s editor, Franklin Foer, was tipped off, he ended Mr. Siegel’s blog and temporarily suspended him from writing for the magazine. Mr. Siegel’s biggest offense, Mr. Foer says, was denying that “sprezzatura” was he. That dishonesty, Mr. Foer says, was inconsistent with The New Republic’s obligation to its readers...