Prometheus 6

'Puppets' Emerge as Internet's Effective, and Deceptive, Salesmen
By Frank Ahrens
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 7, 2006; D01

Herndon-based Ruckus is a legal network for college students to download and share music and movies via a limited, peer-to-peer network. The fledgling service wanted to attract the attention of potential customers -- college-age students, 18 to 24 -- so it created a phony college student named "Brody Ruckus" and set up a Facebook profile page for him, joining the 10 million profiles of real people on the service.

Only Ruckus didn't tell anyone that Brody was fake.

Meat puppet Brody, his page said, was a student in Atlanta. He sought a threesome with his girlfriend "Holly" and another woman. If 100,000 Facebook members joined his page, his girlfriend would acquiesce to the group-sex experience, Brody wrote.

Brody's bold bid caused a mini morality stir in the Facebook world and prompted a flurry of articles and columns in college newspapers. More than 300,000 members signed up.

A few days after Brody's page went up, Facebook discovered he was a fake and pulled the page down for violating Facebook's terms of service.

But Ruckus Networks got access to the e-mail addresses of the 300,000 Facebook users, some of whom began getting unsolicited e-mails about Ruckus products. Ruckus, which is privately owned, is headed by Michael Bebel, the former president of Mashboxx LLC music service and former chief operating officer of the legal version of Napster.

Ruckus would not comment on the Facebook episode, but a source with direct knowledge of the incident said the Brody Ruckus character was dreamed up and launched on Facebook by a zealous young Ruckus employee, who still works at the company. The photo of the fake Brody Ruckus depicted a friend of the Ruckus employee.