"congressional meat-puppet"..........!

[Joel S. Berson]

So where does the "meat" part come from?

Joel

At 7/31/2009 11:46 AM, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 11:05 AM, Alison Murie <sagehen7470 at att.net> wrote:
> >
> > In an article on various health care proposals before congress, Josh
> > Holland uses the expression "congressional meat-puppet,"  a new one on
> > me.  Is this a known expression?
>
> From Wikipedia:
>
>---
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_%28Internet%29#Meatpuppet
>The term "meatpuppet" or "meat puppet" is used as a pejorative
>description for a number of quite different online behaviors. An early
>recorded use is in cyberpunk novelist William Gibson's Neuromancer
>(1984). The term had a long history before the internet, including the
>hardcore band Meat Puppets, and a TV series broadcast in 1980 and
>featuring Wil Wheaton.
>Editors of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia use "meat puppet" to
>deprecate contributions from a new community member if the new member
>was (apparently) recruited by an existing member only to back up the
>recruiting member's position. Wired columnist Lore Sjöberg puts "meat
>puppet" first on a list of "common terms used at Wikipedia," giving
>its Wikipedia meaning as "someone you disagree with."
>A number of other online sources, however, use the term "meatpuppet"
>for varied sockpuppet behaviors. For example, according to one online
>encyclopedia, a meat puppet "publishes comments on blogs, wikis and
>other public venues about some phenomenon or product in order to
>generate public interest and buzz"—that is, engages in the kind of
>behavior more widely known as astroturfing.
>A 2006 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education claimed that
>"[t]he 'meat puppet' is a peculiar inhabitant of the digital world—a
>fictional character that passes for a real person online."
>---

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