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Political Operatives Faked Millions of Comments Against Net Nuetrality
- sincerely 7y agoI guess my question is why did Buzzfeed write this now? Didn't we know that dead people and Barack Obama were sending in anti-net neutrality comments in 2017?
- PeterStuer 7y agoBecause there are new developments in the case, sadly persisting the perversion. Context: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/why-ajit-pais-unhinged-net-neutrality-repeal-was-upheld-by-judges/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/why-ajit-pais-un...
- jasonjayr 7y agoInteresting that DNS Caching is cited as one of the reasons to uphold the reclassification. Perhaps that is the grounding that should be used to promote additional 3rd party DNS resolvers
- newjersey 7y agoI kind of see a pattern here between net neutrality with ISPs and pollution with car makers. I'd like to think in both cases that by walking back (sensible) regulation at the federal level was bad for business. I wonder what that means for online privacy laws. Should the federal government not even touch this?
- yifanl 7y agoI suppose it simply bears worth repeating that the democratic process no longer exists, and I'm assuming they did a recent investigation and found exactly what everyone was expecting.
- d--b 7y agoThe story is that citizen have nothing to gain from anti net neutrality laws. So basically, all comments against net neutrality are either faked or by someone who has skin in the game. People ought to go to jail for this kind of crap.
- phs318u 7y ago> People ought to go to jail for this kind of crap. Yes. The inability of ordinary citizens to ensure that this occurs, is what allows corruption to flourish.
- mwyah 7y ago>The story is that citizen have nothing to gain from anti net neutrality laws. Uh? I very much enjoy my zero-rated services.
- 300bps 7y agoUh? I very much enjoy my zero-rated services. It is fantastically ironic that this anti net neutrality comment was posted with a 17 hour old throw-away account.
- mwyah 7y agodang can attest that I've been here for years. :-) Anyway, I'm pretty sure that customers like zero-rating services. Just think of it: for many people Facebook is the Internet. How is an exemption from the data cap for Facebook a bad thing for the end consumer? Yeah I know, maybe not a good idea in the long term regarding competition, but I don't think customers care too much about that.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dTal 7y agoI'm right there with you that "this sort of thing", i.e. deliberately subverting the process of democracy, should be a serious crime on par with treason. However, can we qualitatively define a line that demarcates "honest communication" from "malicious attempts to change public opinion"? You can't make it a crime to try convince people of things. The basic intent we would like to capture is it should be illegal to lie for political gain, including subtle lies of omission like anonymously pretending on the internet that you're a disinterested bystander. But lying is a very slippery concept to legally define (as is "political gain").
- irjustin 7y agoThis is old news, well known and literally the whole "comments" was a sham anyway. The voting was controlled by 5 people and split on party lines 3-2 [0]. NN was never actually up for debate. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_States#Rollback_of_Obama-era_rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S... - last paragraph
- env123 7y agoWasn't aware of it though. Why can't news be slow?
- doktrin 7y agoAgreed. Nothing wrong with writing about "old" news. Just because I / you / anyone might already know something doesn't mean everybody does, and even if we already know something doesn't mean revisiting it is pointless.
- IshKebab 7y agoBecause then it isn't news anymore. It is history, and it's probably better found on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United...
- Lio 7y agoBy that definition everything is history and nothing is news because everything is read sometime after it was first reported. I’m sure you didn’t mean it as such but that sounds like the kind of argument often used to shutdown discussion of egregious behaviour.
- bhouston 7y agoSomeone should still go to jail for mass lying to the government. This would deter it in the future. Otherwise we are saying this is just the new standard operating procedure, astroturfing using dead people's identities is totally legal.
- anonymousBarker 7y agoWhat would you except in a country where most politicians depends on bribes from the rich? First you buy the worst politicians money can get. Then you purchase "public opinion" to back them up when they push your agendas.
- bschne 7y agoDetails on Jeff Kao's analysis of the comments from 2017: https://medium.com/hackernoon/more-than-a-million-pro-repeal-net-neutrality-comments-were-likely-faked-e9f0e3ed36a6 https://medium.com/hackernoon/more-than-a-million-pro-repeal...
- Quipunotch104 7y agoWait, so a lobby group was behind it all? /s The reality is no one is surprised, and the lack of surprise is exactly why the system is broken. Let’s hope the states advocate for Net Neutrality.
- ryanmarsh 7y agoAstroturfing, troll farms, and AI driven slide bots are the future of discourse where the stakes are high and the conversation is in any way connected to the internet. This will affect all parties on all sides of all debates. I have no idea what this means for society or what should be done about it.
- PeterStuer 7y agoWelcome to the post-truth society. Where this will end nobody knows, but that it will take us into some new 'dark ages' already seems pretty likely.
- jacquesm 7y agoI would argue that we are already well underway towards those 'dark ages'. The fact is that today if you compare the quality of the news and the deluge of information you are bombarded with with say the news grade at the end of the 80's, just before the internet became a commodity that we've slid backwards considerably. Losing quality newspapers as a source of information and replacing them with the current crop of online news sources, filter bubbles and the twitterverse does not feel at all like an improvement to me.
- electrifyTrash 7y agoThe long game is that participation in electronic communication is reduced to rubble and ash. We all withdraw, and seek alternatives to personal remote interaction via telecommunication. We look at the text tumbleweeds blowing across the landscape, knowing they are covered in radioactive dust and asbestos from wars fought long ago in what now resembles a no mans land of WMD cola wars and Michael Dukakis pogroms. Uselessness and futility expressed in magnetic regions and energized transistors. Moldering and soon desiccated well beyond any expiration date. Short term, our eyes and ears are raped by tabloid infographics, as a shortage of sensory chastity belts drives prices through the roof. We lock our doors and listen as boots tromp outside and morons with opinions bayonet and hand grenade everything in sight, until eventually the noxious fumes force even their horses to wear gas masks. We slap wet towels against the door jams as blister agents seep in, and eventually aerial carpet bombing exterminates millions of us. Shell shocked survivors ramble word salad nonsense and gibberish about glam rock and square dancing, as if nerd signaling niche interests will validate the street credibility of their corporate agribusiness ad-supported cybernetic implants hobbled with OEM political opinion software that cannot be uninstalled. But eventually, the war ends when something so terrible emerges, that further sock puppeting becomes unthinkable and a cold war posture leaves only limited proxy misinformation still frothing at the edges of digital electronic systems. The occasional Nigerian robocall reminds us of the bad old days aren't as far away as we'd like to think. The blackened sky and nuclear winter still shrouds the internet as we knew it. All TCP/IP traffic ruined, we still get by with bucket brigades that hand off physical disks that resist tampering through cryptographic integrity mechanisms. Nothing is instantaneous anymore, and some prefer it that way.
- ThalesX 7y agoI try to shy away from politics on this website but I can't shake this nagging feeling that this says something important about the current state of the US and the world. I am not a US citizen nor a resident, nor am I a Russian citizen or resident, so my opinions are absolutely subjective. I feel like whenever an external agent such as Russia opens up the troll farms, the US gets all up in arms about the threat to democracy and how its poor country is under assault by the big bad meanies sending their virtual gargoyles to pray on its innocent citizens and influence their voting habits and put whoever they want in charge of the country and oh woe me, while they are doing it to their own citizens! I don't hear Russia on the world stage as vocal about it as the US, if anything I'm hearing a lot more pragmatic (not something everyone agrees with) geopolitical discussion coming from that side, and I don't hear about them actively targeting their own citizens in "psyops" with the same fervor as the US. Of course, this could mean that the press is free in the US and totally controlled in Russia so of course we hear only one side of the story, but I have this nagging feeling that whereas Russian government is actively and directly sabotaging its citizens, the US is engaged in far more psychologically dangerous activities targeting its state of being, and that the most damage is done by internal forces, not by external baddies. I dunno, might be totally off, who knows...
- simula67 7y agoI am also not a resident of these countries but I also don't think you are that far off. Noam Chomsky talked about this[1] a long time ago. Lies of omission etc are more common in "free" societies. My own view of this is that if you are only presented one side of the story, you are not really free as you are not making an informed choice. Sadly, it is widely accepted everywhere ( even in "liberal" societies ) that certain elites should define what is good and bad and then present it to us in an absolute manner, through deception, if necessary. [1]https://youtu.be/kusAX4Th4N8 https://youtu.be/kusAX4Th4N8
- jacobush 7y agoMost Russians get psyops TV and little internet
- 7y ago
- russdill 7y ago"Project Veritas" But of course.
- fallingfrog 7y agoOf course, no telecom executive will face any consequences for this. No jail time, no slap on the wrist. Business as usual in the good old United States.
- anovikov 7y agoThere is a very close analogy from the past which may explain why net neutrality is a good idea: railways and Standard Oil. Rockfeller making special deals with the railways prioritizing his traffic directly resulted in the worst monopoly in U.S. history, putting millions of people in misery. If that isn't an example of why critical communication channels should be equally available to everyone i don't know what is.
- willis936 7y agoI noticed this while looking through comments while they were still taking submissions. I was outraged. I told everyone I knew who cared. I can’t understand how this story isn’t bigger. I would be much happier if at the time there was a counter force to spam submissions of the opposite opinion and at least make it abundantly clear that the whole thing was a farce. It’s wild that the FCC chair had the gaul to claim the public was against net neutrality from these submissions.
- Bartweiss 7y agoI mean, there was pro-net-neutrality spam, millions of comments worth. It's part of what Pai cited to justify the claim that this wasn't a one-sided problem. Except... the pro-NN spam mostly came in two batches, which could each have been done by a single person. One batch used FakeEmailGenerator, along with what seem to be identities made by pulling randomly from lists of first names, last names, and streets. The second batch exclusively used "@pornhub.com" as the email domain. Both were discounted from every serious attempt at counting responses on each side. It's the worst of both worlds, really. There was enough pro-NN spam numerically to claim the anti-NN astroturfing wasn't any worse, but it represented a tiny number of bad actors. Meanwhile, the anti-NN spam was vastly more malicious in both the influence of the perpetrators and the extremity of the behavior used to hide it. Randomly generating a fake name isn't a misdeed on par with identity theft, but it was certainly treated that way.
- vharuck 7y agoI thought the public comments were a chance for experts or stakeholders to give their opinion of what should be done. I wouldn't be surprised if federal groups just ignored any template submissions. The public comments aren't a voting system, and the number if comments for or against a proposal has little meaning.
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- 5trokerac3 7y agoDeception by omission. That entire comment section was fueled by bots on both sides.
- alexandercrohde 7y agoI am no lawyer, but I would assume that posting as another person online by filling out their name, en masse, is illegal. I would imagine it's slander, fraud, and a number of other crimes.
- ineedasername 7y agoI don't think the comments mattered at all. At most, they provided political cover for the move. Ajit Pai was always going to ram this through. However, the corruption of the public comment system will also give our next president the political cover to change back and, hopefully, enshrine the change in law rather than easily changeable policy.
- GoodJokes 7y agoah yes, the all important comments. I am sure they really have an effect on political appointees /s
- malicioususer11 7y agoreporting about yourself again, eh buzzfeed? :)