I don't know, but it's interesting to ponder how one would detect them if they were. I'd love to see a project to scrape HN comments and try to auto-detect the sockpuppet posts.

It's a bit scary though, since a false positive on that could really hurt someone's reputation... if I wrote something like that, I'd actually be a little bit reluctant to share it. :-(

We see them, or what we believe to be them on reddit a lot. Typically, they have a pro-military agenda - often posting "emotional" military pics from accounts that are days old in an attempt to garner a sympathetic response.

Other accounts post pro-government comments again from young accounts.

We ban them pretty quickly. If you look at a users comment history and they are clearly having an agenda to post - they are either misguided, uninformed or sock-puppets.

As a mod of a ~large /r/ I wish I could see the IPs of the people posting. Specifically, if I could see if they are .mil (i.e. Eglin) IPs - so I could ban the whole range.

> We see them, or what we believe to be them on reddit a lot. Typically, they have a pro-military agenda - often posting "emotional" military pics from accounts that are days old in an attempt to garner a sympathetic response.

So basically the weekly "Check out my dog! He served with me in Afghanistan!" posts on Reddit from hour-old accounts?

Yes, those and the accounts that come in attempting to shut down criticism and discussion on other topics where their is clearly a national narrative the MSM is trying to push.

Ever thought of making a crowd sourced extension that would target these kinds of accounts? A select few people would have the privilege to tag these accounts, and everyone else using the extension would be able to see the tagged acounts.

Pretty sure HN is under their radar for the most part.

Really? Because I'm not.