I’d consider that Jerkish behavior. And i’d guess others would think it enough to pull out the banhammer as well. Especially if you used it to give yourself credence.
Addressing this strictly as a hypothetical, I don’t think we’d care very much. Caveat lector and all that. Posts should be judged by their quality, not by the purported level of learning of the poster. If the person is making bad quality posts, anyone who puts more credence in them because of their supposed expertise mainly has themselves to blame.
But we’d have to have a real instance to be able to judge the severity. In the couple of cases of misrepresentation that have been mentioned the posters were essentially trolling.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/faq.php?faq=vb3_board_faq#faq_sdmb_rules
This has been in force for a long long time. It wasn’t so much when we were at AOL, where you could have multiple screen names and still be “legal” under the AOL Terms of Service (which we were bound by as well as the AOL members; that’s why you see older columns that have had all the cuss words taken out of them, that was AOL. But I digress.)
After we got out on our own we insisted on one screen name to a customer, period. We enforce that today.
Ah! I’ve wondered about that before. I suspected it was something like that, but I did wonder if Unca Cece had gotten soft at some point. (Or I was just more easily shocked in my younger days and remembered more cursing than there was.) Censoring the “shit” in his column about Schrodinger’s Cat was like putting pasties on the Venus de Milo, however.
TubaDiva said:
Actually, that change happened sometime after the board changeover. I know, because I didn’t start posting until after the AOL days, and I remember when socks were legal.
No, not “legal.” We just couldn’t do anything about the fact that someone had more than one AOL screen name – it’s permissible under AOL’s Terms of Service.
We’ve always discouraged having duplicate registrations, though when we were on AOL we didn’t have a lot of teeth to back that up. When we got out from under AOL we could insist on it, as we do today and have done for a long time.
There were a few times on AOL when we had “masked chat” and people attended under different screen names, but those times were rare. That’s not socking.
Bah, I bet they’d ban people that threatened the Chicago Reader with illegal action, too.
Life is so unfair. 
Wasn’t that what started the whole “Winter of Our Missed Content?” (Or else it was done by the same person?)
IIRC we had a server failure over several weeks – the system was supposed to be doing a backup every night and it had failed to do so for a while. This was part of the server failure problem and by the time it was discovered we could do nothing but move to a new server and start again with the most recent backup we had, which was several weeks old. This resulted in a gap of about six weeks or so of postings and registrations that vanished into the ether.