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Wired Campus

The latest on tech and education.

Attack of the ‘Meat Puppets’

By Brock Read October 9, 2006

Thousands of Facebook users this fall befriended a character named Brody Ruckus—a student from Atlanta who claimed his girlfriend would reward him with a threesome if he amassed 100,000 “friends” on his profile page. Brody’s oh-so-chivalrous plea generated a good deal of debate on the site, but in the end, he got his wish: Over 300,000 people signed up, and Brody became something of a frathouse hero.

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Thousands of Facebook users this fall befriended a character named Brody Ruckus—a student from Atlanta who claimed his girlfriend would reward him with a threesome if he amassed 100,000 “friends” on his profile page. Brody’s oh-so-chivalrous plea generated a good deal of debate on the site, but in the end, he got his wish: Over 300,000 people signed up, and Brody became something of a frathouse hero.

The threesome never took place, though. Brody, in fact, wasn’t even a real student. He was a “meat puppet” created by an employee at Ruckus, a company that offers legal music and movie downloads to college students.

The “meat puppet” is a peculiar inhabitant of the digital world—a fictional character that passes for a real person online. And thanks to the runaway popularity of social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, it has become an increasingly common marketing tool, reports The Washington Post.

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Although Facebook officials pulled Brody’s profile down when they realized the character was a fraud, Ruckus still made off with the e-mail addresses of some 300,000 students. Some of those students soon received unsolicited e-mail messages about Ruckus products, according to the Post.

Deceptive advertising isn’t anything new, and it’s not the end of the world. But a proliferation of Facebook profiles that represent marketing schemes, not real people, would surely provide even more incentive for colleges students to be a bit circumspect about their social-network surfing. —Brock Read

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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