Blog P.I.

It’s been a bumper week for post-Hiltzik sock puppetry. First a number of remarkably similar comments praising Glenn Greenwald on various blogs were discovered to have come from Glenn Greenwald’s IP address, and now this.

It’s hard to know exactly what to say about Jason Leopold, whose name was already a byword for unreliability and who now appears to be having some sort of very public breakdown. Seixon has a number of lengthy and fascinating posts on the matter, the highlight coming when Leopold threatens him with legal action and then posts obviously forged emails from Seixon at ThinkProgress. (Since removed, but documented here.) It’s entirely possible there are more fireworks to come.

After being caught, Michael Hiltzik lost his column and was suspended from the LA Times. Here, unless Leopold ends up facing criminal charges, there are unlikely to be any such ramifications. As far as Greenwald is concerned, it’d be hard to say the revelations of sock-puppetry have damaged him in any serious way: his defenders probably don’t care, and his detractors were already a lost cause. For Greenwald, multiple online defenders posting under different names from his IP address just count as more mau-mauing.

The Greenwald and Leopold affairs do share a relative artlessness; in fact, that the infractions in question are so obvious might be the most embarrassing thing about them. The Greenwald sock puppets all sounded exactly the same, all wrote exactly like Glenn Greenwald, and were all devoted to pointing out what a big deal Glenn Greenwald was. Even without checking IP addresses and analyzing timestamps, it’s impossible to read them without a few red flags being raised. Similarly, there are many reasons to believe that Jason Leopold fabricated portions of his emails from Seixon, but chief among them is that it’s simply not plausible that they would contain passages like:

You’re damn right it’s blackmail. Johnson must be stopped and you’re the target. I will take you down and I will have the National Review back me up.

Presumably, there are more cunning practitioners of the form out there. While watching the ongoing misadventures of Jason Leopold, we should spare a thought for the good sock puppets of the blogosphere: the ones we don’t notice.