Sure. You have asked for "an example," so one. To find one quickly, I search RationalWiki users for "Abd."
ABD WATCHING YOUUU (talk | contribs) (Created on 6 November 2019 at 02:36) (blocked)
That was easy, I think I have seen hundreds there. That one had no contributions. Blocked for "ban evasion." Which in context means it was believed it was me. (The likely impersonator is not banned, which says much about RatWiki.)
Want WMF socks? The interesting ones to me are impersonations of other users, though there are several of me I have seen.
This is also a great example of how fucked up Wikipedia -- and WMF wikis in general -- can be. It is also the situation that got me involved with Smith socks.
SPI case filed
22 June 2017 by
Michael skater. No action on that (there was actual socking by Blastikus, but minor and harmless). So see the next filing,
19 August 2017. No checkuser. If there had been checkuser, it would have found that MIchael skater was the sockmaster.
As a result of the defiant, in-your-face socking pretending to be the target, a WPadmin went to Wikiversity and was able to get the user blocked there, and a page he'd been working on -- a long-time target of trolls -- deleted (entirely contrary to policy, by the way).
When I found this, I went to meta and filed
a steward checkuser request, and Bingo! (Notice how Vituzzu tried to shut that down, with a false argument.)
And then it started raining trollsocks, and when I confronted that, to make a long story short, I was blocked on Wikiversity, the major pretense being an alleged "vendetta." And that same 'crat blocked the target again. This was a privately coordinated attack, -- visibly so with IP solicitation -- involving a WP admin (JzG), a long-term antifringe user (Joshua P. Schroeder) (now using an unpronounceable name in Sinhalese), and fitting in with a long-term agenda on Wikiversity to Ban Abd.
They do this stuff because it works. Naive users assume that a sock saying "I'm XXX and I'm a-gonna sue you ass" is XXX. After all who else would say that? Or they quote some of what the target has written, so it sounds like the target. And then they spam it in many irrelevant places and use many accounts to do so. Again, who else? It's an example of how trolls have learned to manipulate standard wiki human reactions.
I can cite many examples where it actually worked. Darryl (my very likely identification of "AP-B") got the low-carb people fired up about "vegans." But it wasn't vegans, it was Smith socks all the way down. Wikipedia:
extensive coverage on the CFC blog, the account was
Skeptic from Britain.
He used a quite clever device. He created socks which outed XXX as Skeptic from Britain on blog pages, then he requested rename and retired because "he'd been outed." Wikipedians eat whatever shit is posted, -- unless it conflicts with their beliefs -- and don't notice that XXX was actually someone who had confronted SfB. So ... no checkuser on SfB, and no suspicion that he was an AngloPyramidologist sock, which he was, the best known incarnation being
Goblin Face, ancient nemesis of Rome Viharo.
The 'pediots never figured out that Anglo Pyramidologist was two people, with distinct interests, even though apparently twin brothers. So we see the confusion all through the SPI archive. And then Darryl moved from anti-psychic activism to anti-health-woo, attacking any challenge to "mainstream" belief, even if skepticism is thoroughly based in science (he calls it "denialism"). (Health research sucks big time, poor science is palmed off when it serves big pharma, etc. And that is all common knowledge among physicians, I discuss it with them.)
To bring this back to relevance to this topic,
EVilgent has allied himself with the Smith socks, citing their claims as if authoritative.