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More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked
- everdev 9y agoJust like the election, I wonder if the people behind this care if they get caught as long as they get what they want first. There doesn't seem to be much precedent for overturning laws or elections that were subject to misinformation campaigns.
- Natsu 9y agoDoes it really matter? This wasn't a vote and they weren't listening to our opinions anyhow, this was just some jerk spamming a comment box. What really matters is that they're on the site of the ISPs that want to screw us all over. I still remember the very start of net neutrality when everyone was still on the same side, before the lobbyists went to work dividing us over how to respond to it.
- SkyMarshal 9y ago>I still remember the very start of net neutrality when everyone was still on the same side, before the lobbyists went to work dividing us over how to respond to it. Indeed, I remember the astroturf group Hands Off The Internet starting up back around ~2005. They've been working on this for over a decade now. https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Hands_Off_the_Internet https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Hands_Off_the_Internet
- tudorw 9y agoFights for control have been going on in various forms since the start, '1978 the Post Office proposed to open a new service, called E-COM' from 'Mail Chauvinism: The Magicians, the Snark and the Camel' by Ted Nelson https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v7n11/MailChauvinism.php https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v7n11/MailChauvinism...
- wpietri 9y agoIf it didn't matter, why do you think somebody spent a lot of time doing it?
- viraptor 9y agoI don't know if it mattered, but the comments as shown in the article are pretty much the same copy with various simple replacements for many phrases. This happens in lots of spam campaigns. I'm not sure anyone spent much time doing it - could be few hours for someone who does spam already. It doesn't look like a sophisticated or costly action.
- wpietri 9y agoYou didn't answer the question. If it didn't matter, why did somebody invest time in doing it?
- Natsu 9y agoJust because I have good reason to believe it never mattered, that doesn't mean that everyone agrees with me. Even then, people spend significant amounts of time on things that don't matter (see also: social media, entertainment, etc.). Given that spamming a comment form is a few lines of Perl - http://search.cpan.org/dist/libwww-perl/lwpcook.pod http://search.cpan.org/dist/libwww-perl/lwpcook.pod - the idea that some nut might spend 30 seconds ordering their computer to spam the FCC does not strike me as farfetched, nor does it seem reasonable to waste time caring about that. Better to focus our efforts on lobbying the FCC to change this boneheaded decision. Frankly, I think the point that they don't care about our comments to begin with is more damning than whether or not an idiot spammed a comment box.
- viraptor 9y agoI wasn't planning to, since we can't answer this without knowing who did it. My point was just to provide context for "spent time". It wasn't some huge operation. It could've been one day for one person. At that point the cost is so low it could've been done for the lulz. Or it could've been a cheap case of foreign groups trying to achieve something. Who knows.
- brudgers 9y ago[I am not a lawyer] Only Congress passes laws (statutes). The FCC is a regulatory body. It has statutory authority (delegated by Congress) to create regulations, not statutes (laws). Proposed FCC regulations have to go through a process defined by statute. Publication and comment are part of that process. Irregularities in the process may form the basis of judicial challenge. Whether what is described here constitutes an irregularity is another matter. Regulations may have the force of a law, but don't receive the same level of judicial deference in terms of intent. If Congress were to a law to explicitly end net neutrality, the courts would have to assume that the law is the will of the people and a challenge could only be made on Constitutional grounds. An FCC regulation can also be challenged on legal grounds (the regulation violates a statute).
- winter_blue 9y ago> Regulations may have the force of a law, but don't receive the same level of judicial deference in terms of intent. Yes, statutory laws must be proven unconstitutional to be struck down, and regulatory laws can be more easily affected by judicial decisions. But for the last 30 years, regulations have been accorded an inappropriate degree of deference by the courts: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/25/gorsuch-is-right-about-chevron-deference/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
- alacombe 9y agoIf "anti net-neutrality" regulations shall be considered unconstitutional, so shall "pro net-neutrality" ones. [edit: instead of downvoting me, tell me why left-leaning regulations are automatically Good (and constitutional), and why right-leaning are automatically Evil (and unconstitutional) ?]
- existencebox 9y agoI'll take the bait and explain why I'm downvoting you. The parent posts had literally nothing to do with left vs right. It has to do with accepting the results of misinformation campaigns, and post-factum not taking steps to revert malign legislation. Even in the case that I give you the benefit of the doubt in that you're taking "pro-net-neutrality" to be in some way left-leaning, the bulk of the arguments I've read fall into the "empiricism" bucket rather than "partisanship," either citing precedent of negative outcomes (portugal) or the industry's proven inability to self-regulate (local monopolies ala comcast, fights against municipal broadband, etc). I'm also somewhat entertained that maintaining a competitive business landscape has somehow become "leftist." To my mind that's very pro-small-business/free market to prohibit large entities from soley dominating a market and legislating protective walls; even Reagan took an aggressive antitrust stance; this not even touching on that internet looks a lot more like a utility necessary for "survival" in a modern world than a good nowadays.
- frik 9y agoThey are not individuals, but bots by companies. You just have to look at the bots that write pro-comments on HN, Reddit, etc. Think about, who has advantage from it?
- searealist 9y ago> Just like the election Please don't instigate a flame war.
- downandout 9y agoIf you’re referring to my comment (which is now flagged, for no reason other than it being less than sympathetic to HC’s argument that the Russians ruined the election for her - you have to love HN), I wasn’t flaming anyone. I simply pointed out that IMO this FCC incident is much more serious than what happened in the election. Leaked but real emails about unethical/illegal conduct did nothing more than make the voters better informed about actual facts, while this incident intentionally presented false data to the voters at the FCC, who may rely on it in their decision making. The latter is infinitely worse IMO. One involves better informing the voters, the other involves lying to them.
- Bud 9y agoVoters were made "better informed" by Roger Stone's ratf*king and the Comey letter? No they weren't.
- downandout 9y ago>Just like the election This seems far worse than what happened with the election. The hacked emails at issue in the election were real, and they revealed bad things that the Clinton campaign was involved in. I have always found it laughable that the complaint seems to be “we lost because the Russians uncovered the bad things I was doing, and it’s not fair that people found out about them”. If the emails had all been about how she was going to bend over backwards to help the American people, perhaps it wouldn’t have been such a problem for her. In this case, the data being given to a comparatively minuscule group of “voters” (the FCC) was fake, and intended to completely misrepresent public opinion. To the extent that the FCC cares about public opinion, this is worse than simply exposing the actual misdeeds of a political candidate and her henchmen.
- Gaelan 9y agoGiven that the FCC resisted efforts to investigate, I wouldn’t be surprised if the FCC was complit in the fake messages (so they could claim they were in line with public opinion)
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- BinaryIdiot 9y agoAfter working as a government contracting for many years I'd lean more towards gross incompetency than anything complicit. All the people in charge of critical tech in the DoD that I dealt with here placed their through nepotism and had no clue what they were doing. Granted I'm not saying anything of this is good I just think it's far more likely that they're all idiots over there.
- inpdx 9y agoI'd love to see Trump's emails. But, very curiously, wikileaks didn't release anything negative about Trump. Only seeing one side's dirty laundry is the problem. Don't kid yourself that only one side had it.
- vuln 9y agoLike every company in the tech industry? 'Disrupt' ie break all of the laws and grow faster than you can get sued. Then when you do get sued throw mountains of investor money at it and ask for more.
- dangrossman 9y agoI got a bunch of emails from senators thanking me for contacting them this week... before I had contacted any of them. Who knows what was said in my name.
- make3 9y agoThanks
- dang 9y agoWould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
- erentz 9y agoI got some too. In my case they were from battleforthenet.com. Maybe yours were too? I had signed up quite some time ago, so I was surprised to see these. I guess they only recently sent them or the senators only recently responded.
- xahrepap 9y agoSame. Came just last week for me.
- benjaminjackman 9y agorobots thanking robots
- pessimizer 9y agoweb 2.0 -> web 3.0
- avs733 9y agoI would report that to them, report that to the Sergeant at Arms for the US Congress (because hey...that seems like a CFAA violation using their computer system), and your state attorney general. Being angry accomplishes nothing, being noisy accomplishes a little. being FUCKING ANNOYING and ever present accomplishes marginally but meaningfully more.
- lettergram 9y agoIt's times like these where an actual - in person protest - might be more effective.
- avs733 9y agoI posted this last week and stand by it... A small counter suggestion. I know we all tend to be introverted but...go visit your reps. Visit them in DC, visit them in their offices in your area. Most will be home this week for thanksgiving and almost all will be home over the holiday break. Email them to schedule a meeting or call. Make them explain this to your face. I tried this and after five emails have meetings with my rep and both my senators scheduled less than a week out.
- chronic824 9y ago> I tried this and after five emails have meetings with my rep and both my senators scheduled less than a week out. Good for you. I'm going to go back to eating my leftover turkey and continue black friday/cyber Monday shopping. Maybe I'll check my Tesla Model 3 preorder status.
- derwiki 9y agoYou created a new account to demoralize the GP?
- eropple 9y agoHe created a new account to troll. It's an ugly trend; while it's minor, HN has a bit of a problem with this sort of thing. I assume that 'dang and 'sctb are on the case when this arises (and I flagged the post because of it), but it's probably a hard one to solve.
- krapp 9y agoThe solution is already in place - don't engage with them, just flag their comments and leave them alone. The mods are alerted whenever a comment is flagged so they can get around to banning those accounts eventually.
- adamnemecek 9y agoWhat needs to happen for shit like this not to happen anymore.
- torpfactory 9y agoGet money out of politics. No more superPACs. No more third party bullshit. My proposal: only contributions from individuals to official campaign organizations. Each person can donate a total of $100, split any way they want. I’m tired of so many decisions being made at the behest of some campaign funder whispering in a politician’s ear. Our democracy is being corroded by all this money.
- Kodix 9y agoBetter yet, make it a tax break. You can choose where $100 of your tax goes by writing in the organizations. This is a thing in Poland for donating to nonprofits, except it's 1% of your tax. It seems to work alright.
- wallace_f 9y agoHow will this help stop, if not even do more to empower, ambitious billionaires seeking public office to further their own goals?
- Kodix 9y agoMy alteration specifically or the idea generally? The only reason I suggested a tax break is because it would work as a good motivator for people to actually engage themselves a bit. They're paying the money anyway, why not do something with it? The idea generally... in an ideal world where you simply could not fund campaigns from money except from public donations like this, it'd just even the odds a little bit for non-billionaires. I don't know of a way to make the existing money and power of billionaires not matter in politics at all, though. There's always loopholes and workarounds.
- lucaspiller 9y ago
- IncRnd 9y agoI'm glad that this is being brought up. However, duplicated comments are not necessarily faked. For instance, there are many times centralized campaigns that people can sign onto for sending messages. The messages from those, while identical, are proper and what the individuals believe. This happens on both sides of issues. So, please continue to investigate, but be careful you don't interject your own biases into your investigation.
- dingo_bat 9y ago> be careful you don't interject your own biases into your investigation. That ship has sailed a long time ago.
- Kodix 9y agoSure. But where is this campaign located, exactly? And how come dead people are signing up for it in droves, as has been discovered in the past? And how come people who didn't sign up for it find "their" comments sent, too? I'm all for avoiding bias, but we know enough about this campaign by now to say with certainty it's shady.
- IncRnd 9y agoIf you read the article you will see that whether this is a campaign or not is asked rhetorically, but the question it is not answered. These campaigns are extremely common in the world of online commenting, especially around government commenting systems.
- nadaviv 9y agoThe messages the post points out to are not duplicates, though. They have a very similar meaning, but uses entirely different wording so that they won't appear duplicates. In other words, someone went through the trouble of trying to cloak the fact that they're duplicates.
- IncRnd 9y ago> The messages the post points out to are not duplicates, though. There were two separate categories from the article. This is text from the article, "The vast majority of FCC comments were submitted as exact duplicates or as part of letter-writing/spam campaigns."
- dingo_bat 9y agoFCC has explicitly said that they have ignored any opinion comments. They have only considered comments which bring new facts or a legal opinion. So the fact that many comments were faked is irrelevant anyway.
- viraptor 9y agoI assume that would be the case, but looking from outside it's hard to know what did they actually look at. They could gain a lot more confidence from the public if they marked ignored comments as ignored. It would both avoid this discussion and allow people to read the actually interesting content that is going to influence the result.
- neandrake 9y agoIsn't is still fraud though? Submissions of opinions to a government agency under citizen's names without their consent or even knowledge -- it sounds illegal and not addressing this sorta thing now sets a crazy precedent.
- jandrese 9y agoRight. They outright said that they are only worried about getting into legal trouble for what they're doing. Protecting the public interest is no longer considered to be part of their mandate.
- snuxoll 9y agoWhich would hopefully bite them in the ass if I had any faith in a Trump-appointed judicial branch. The FCC is required to take public comments into account when making regulations, this should be a fairly straightforward lawsuit.
- droopybuns 9y agoI don’t believe that botnet activity has been limited to one side, based on how reddit has looked this last week. Example of suspicious postings: https://www.reddit.com/r/Frisson/comments/7engpr/image_reddit_united_against_net_neutrality/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Frisson/comments/7engpr/image_reddi...
- d23 9y agoHow are those suspicious? It's an issue redditors care a lot about. A lot of those posts were done by moderators in their respective communities and don't appear to be copied and pasted content. It looks from the screengrab like you upvoted them too...
- theWatcher37 9y agoYeah. Mass conformance is never suspicious.
- droopybuns 9y agoNot my screengrab. That is a post in frisson where someone is posting a pic that supposedly will generate frisson. There is clearly a campaign to post subreddit themed references to the topic. The vote counts seem aberrant to me as well.
- alacombe 9y agoHack'tivism is just like antifa. When the right does it (with parsimony), it's the embodiment of Evil. When the left does it (on an industrial scale), it's virtuous.
- jeffdavis 9y agoThe centralization of the web is what worries me. I suppose non-neutral net can contribute to that, but even with a neutral net we've seen extraordinary centralization around a few major sites. Will neutrality really save us?
- matt4077 9y agoIt might not be enough to create exactly the net you want. But yes, net neutrality is strictly better for decentralisation than the alternative. That is because neutrality creates a (somewhat) level playing field. Without it, Facebook could, theoretically, pay Comcast to slow down a new competitor that is just emerging. I say "theoretically", because such an action, if taken overtly, would probably still run afoul of competition law. But there will be other, more subtle, ways to achieve similar results. I would expect the result to be worse for data-heavy and latency-sensitive applications, as well as anything using a non-standard protocol (i. e. peer-to-peer networking etc). It's possible, although not certain, that current service levels might remain accessible for new startups. But any future improvements would be tied to signing contracts with any provider whose customers any new startup would want to reach. Prices will tend to be exactly the value of these customers to the startup, minus one cent–or as close to that as can be measured.
- manquer 9y agoThey don't need to _slow_ anyone down. They just need to be faster or better connected with the end users with lesser connection drops etc. This all the major players already do with their private networks and CDNs and servers at a global PoPs. No startup without serious muscle can compete with that . In the same vine major players also built and own dedicated DCs , hardware and networking equipment and locate it all over the world, new players can't compete possibly with that anyway. There has never been any level playing field, New players are nimble and more risk friendly and do not have the baggage of existing users , older players have resource advantage and may need to choose between cannibalizing current users for new areas of growth or avoiding the segment all together.
- 9y ago
- retox 9y agoThere was also a lot of direct copypaste spam on the pro-NN side https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Sc4-R2waeRrGnNL90dO3JA.png https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Sc4-R2waeRrGnNL90...
- colejohnson66 9y agoI’m sure a lot of the pro duplicates are from websites that help the person post a comment, but they just use the form comment instead of adding their own stuff.
- Alterlife 9y agoWouldn't this logic apply to the anti nn side as well?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Spare_account 9y agoThe clincher, though, is that the significant majority of the natural language, individually written comments supported Net Neutrality. Yes, there are vested interests prepared to commit fraud on both sides. But all of the people feel the same way about this. I suppose the question therefore is, if the politicians are prepared to upset all of the people, they must be pretty confident they'll still be re-elected next time around?
- Danihan 9y agoWe just need to move to full-on direct democracy. Not representative. Then there would be fewer questions about "what the people actually want."
- Karunamon 9y agoAt the risk of unavoidable snark, I’d rather not have the entire country live by what California and New York want. We have states where the EU has countries - there’s still a massive cultural disconnect that would render that system unfair to everyone not living in a metro area.
- randyrand 9y agoDoes the FCC take copy pasted online comments seriously to being with? This seems like the stupidest way to decide legislation.
- freshboxoffice 9y agoPictures Of Bollywood Actors You May Have Never Seen Before rare and unseen snaps of bollywood stars must watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHam1l8I8nc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHam1l8I8nc
- cmurf 9y agoWorse, the FCC has evidence the NY state attorney general needs to investigate and prosecute these fake submissions as identity theft, but the FCC refuses to acknowledge the NY AG at all, let alone assist. At the least it makes the FCC look servile, and at worst complicit.
- ivv 9y agoThe "mail-merge" the article refers to is also known as "spinning". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning
- bufferoverflow 9y agoEvery social media website is dominated by people supporting net neutrality. I don't even remember seeing an opposing opinion, except from Trump's government. Maybe I'm living in some weird bubble, but it seems to me the argument is really not an argument, but an artificially created nonsense.
- Kequc 9y agoI may not be up on the latest news. My understanding from the best sources I can find detail a disagreement within the government about how net neutrality is implemented, not that it exists. Internet providers want to repeal net neutrality. Democrats are happy with the current implementation. Republicans want to enshrine net neutrality in law through congress, stripping what they believe is overreach on the part of the FCC. The fact that net neutrality can currently be repealed so easily suggests to me that putting it through congress is a good idea. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/01/what-trumps-new-fcc-chairman-thinks-about-net-neutrality/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/02/01...
- ori_b 9y ago> Republicans want to enshrine net neutrality in law through congress, stripping what they believe is overreach on the part of the FCC. I've heard this, but I still see no law on the books, and a very strong push for the FCC to remove the regulations that are currently in place. I'd believe them if I saw an effort to put a replacement plan in motion before repealing.
- Danihan 9y agoYou could just be against government price controls in general..
- eecc 9y agoHow does “government price control” relate to simply forbidding double sale? All NN does is to disallow ISP from tiering the internet and double dipping on both sides of the network. Imagine if you had to pay a different subscription to call only family, another also for friends, anyone on the Bell directory, anyone on other directories, businesses. You’d imagine telephones would have remained a novelty to this day
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jarym 9y agoCripes. Ajit Pai must badly be wanting to compete against Martin Shkreli as most despised man in America. Shkreli ended up in a jump suit (no doubt picking up soap frequently). Is Pai next?
- grecy 9y agoSo many in the tech community support Net Neutrality, it's always shocked me that more people don't build bots to submit comments like the opposition do. Surely the tech community could easily submit a few billion (trillion?) legit-looking comments in support of Net Neutrality that would a) completely cripple the servers or b) produce so much spam that it overwhelms anything useful and all comments are ignored.... why not?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- malux85 9y agoBecause so many comments would be instantly recognized as spam. The Anti-Net-Neutrality side would then use that as a narrative that all NN arguments are fake and draw even more stupid conclusions like "This is why we're right". They would spin it to play to their narrative. The best way is to get as many real people as possible to make as much noise as possible.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bo1024 9y agoBecause it's ethically wrong and would backfire horribly. Think about the consequences for a minute. (a) cripple the servers -- that's bad, then real people can't submit their real opinions and comments. (b) overwhelm anything useful and all comments are ignored -- why would you want that?? The vast majority of real comments favor net neutrality, why would you want them to be ignored? Of course, your arguments do make sense for the anti-NN companies who don't want real people's comments heard, which is probably why they did it.
- daveheq 9y agoHow many fake ones were pro-net neutrality? I could see Russia writing fake ones to disrupt things... And then there will be the rise of the bot wars (Ender's Game was prophetic!).
- stretchwithme 9y agoHow we express our opinions in a democracy needs to re-engineered. It needs to be secure and it needs to matter. Comments anybody can make and that are easily ignored are relatively useless. The powers that be aren't going to fix this. If the voters had real, direct power, the lobbyists would not. And you can't put the voters' money directly into your pocket. So we have to do it. We need to create an open-source, secure and low cost solution that shadows an existing state legislature and does a superior job for the voters. And California is the perfect state for it. Let the voters decide the issues or let them "elect" anyone in the state to exercise their vote for them. Use proportional representation. Vote any time. Elect any time. Once this system is proven, voters can decide whether to DUMP the California State Assembly and let the State Senate create and debate all the bills. Then we make it work for all those who can't use or that don't trust the Internet. Once adopted, the same system can be rolled out in other states and maybe some day it will replace the House of Representatives. People have to see it work small before they trust it big.
- halflings 9y agoI would not say that something applied in California, state with the largest population, is an example of "work small before they trust it big". Are you proposing a direct democracy system where the regular election cycle for representatives is obsolete, and people directly vote on issues and/or can elect new representatives at any time?
- stretchwithme 9y agoImplementing that in California is a small challenge compared to implementing it for the US. The latter would take years and 2/3 of the states must agree, as it would mean a change to the Constitution.
- stretchwithme 9y agoYes. This breaks down the concentration of power while still enabling people to hand off this task to a trusted delegate. Anybody that is qualified to hold office. Or it could even be a representative from the other house. And you could change who you delegate to any time. Instead of thinking they have a mandate for 4 years, the amount of power a representative actually has would go up and down over time. He or she could be out of power overnight if the voters lose faith. Of course, the Senate would still work the old way.
- dreamache 9y agoDown with net neutrality. It's just another government program that the very top tech companies love, because it helps squash competition. Open and free markets are always superior.