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Friendly reminder that there were massive bot compaigns on both sides of the issue. https://archive.fo/sp9Q7 https://archive.fo/sp9Q7 this WSJ article found tho

by ikeboy 6y ago

Friendly reminder that there were massive bot compaigns on both sides of the issue. https://archive.fo/sp9Q7 https://archive.fo/sp9Q7 this WSJ article found thousands of people that said they never posted the comments attributed to them. >One 369-word comment supporting the Obama-era net-neutrality rules was posted on the FCC website more than 300,000 times. One of those was attributed to Gloria Burney, 87, a retired speech therapist in Los Angeles. She isn’t in favor of repealing those rules, she said, “but I never wrote that.” A comment from “Elzor The Blarghmaster” at 9632 Elm Road, Maywood, Ill., was among the 818,000 identical FCC comments backing the Trump policy. No such address could be found, said Jimmie Thompson, a U.S. Postal Service carrier in Maywood. If you've got the impression that the bot compaigns were only from one side, you've just been misled by biased media like OP, which links to prior coverage of one company and doesn't bother to tell you about the broader picture.

deleted 6y ago
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ikeboy 6y ago
>He said the FCC received more than 7.5 million comments consisting of the same short-form letter supporting the current rules from about 45,000 unique email addresses, “all generated by a single fake e-mail generator website.” He said the FCC received more than 400,000 comments supporting the old rules “from the same address in Russia.”
Arubis 6y ago
And of course, if the tinfoil hat mentality is appealing, why not one actor spamming comments for _both_ sides? If said actor prefers one position they can just have a an order-of-magnitude difference in what they submitted; either way, said hypothetical party can be satisfied with eroding public trust in the process.
- ikeboy 6y ago
  Perhaps - my own pet theory is it was just some bored guys on 4chan who did it because they could. The thing is, a lot of the bots didn't submit comments directly, which would have required getting keys to submit in bulk and leave a trail. Instead, they filled out forms on the many sites that were set up to take names and submit form letters to the FCC. So some advocacy org might set up a site and get a million comments, half of them might be legit and half might be from a script kiddy running a database of addresses and names through the site, which then submits it to the FCC. The site has no particular incentive to vet the submissions. Knowing the IP address of the entity who sent the message to the FCC is close to useless, in that scenario.
- simion314 6y ago
  I would consider the scenario where it was not just 1 person/group, you could have more then 1 person trying to cheat the system in favor of his favorite tribe or even just trolls practicing their scripting skills.
rrauenza 6y ago
I found a comment attributed to my parents, asked them about it and they had no idea how it could have happened.
- redbeard0x0a 6y ago
  my grandmother too, asked her and she had no idea what I was talking about
salawat 6y ago
This is actually a practice I shun. I submitted commentary on behalf of most of the people in my relatively meager social circle, but at a minimum I 'asked' them if it was alright to do so, explained to them the position I was advocating and asked them if they were in alignment enough to be comfortable being included. Scraping names/addresses and blasting comments without actually doing the footwork actually undermines the integrity of the entire thing. For both sides. I won't deny an automated form filler script didn't pass through my mind as an option; but I have a very intense distaste for people who engage in unauthorized proxy behavior, or who subvert other's identities online. Especially now that everyone has thrown out the prevailing common sense of not linking your real life persona to your digital presence. It's one of those lines you just don't cross. Then again, I've been called an anachronism by peers before; and with recent behavior by various large companies (Wells Fargo) taking the initiative to sign people up for things they don't ask for, maybe my brand of professional ethos hasn't aged well.
geofft 6y ago
I don't think the evidence you've posted supports that there were massive bot campaigns. The popular thesis, which the evidence you've presented is consistent with, is - the pro-net-neutrality side organized virtual letter-writing campaigns, getting lots of actual human people to send in pre-written messages they agree with but did not author - the anti-net-neutrality side, unable to find large numbers of actual human people who agreed, used bots to pretend to be lots of people and therefore, to the underlying question of what policy do more actual human people support, we should disregard many more of the received anti-net-neutrality comments.
- ikeboy 6y ago
  Did you read the WSJ article I linked to? It shows plenty of fake comments submitted by the pro-net-neutrality side. Just asserting that it was only one side who resorted to fake comments is an evidence-free position. I struggle to think how you can characterize 7 million fake comments out of 23 million total that came from a "single fake e-mail generator website" as "the pro-net-neutrality side organized virtual letter-writing campaigns, getting lots of actual human people to send in pre-written messages they agree with but did not author" I get that this narrative is more comfortable for some to believe, but it's plainly contradicted by the facts.
  - geofft 6y ago
    The claim you made was, "Friendly reminder that there were massive bot compaigns on both sides of the issue." The claim I made was, "I don't think the evidence you've posted supports that there were massive bot campaigns," bot in italics. You have now changed your claim to be about "fake comments," independent of bots, which is not what we were talking about. Nor did I claim that it was "only one side who resorted to fake comments" - I said "we should disregard many more of the received anti-net-neutrality comments. I did not say that we should disregard zero received pro-net-neutrality comments. It is certainly true that a nonzero number of comments on both sides were fake comments. The question is whether that's a small number or a large number, and whether the numbers are the same (let alone "massive") on both sides. The WSJ article you linked to includes evidence that a number of anti-net-neutrality comments were posted by bots - see the paragraphs starting "Chicago programmer..." - and that a number of pro-net-neutrality comments were posted by humans encouraged to send in pre-canned messages. Those are certainly not "bot campaigns." Whether those comments count as "fake comments," whether those comments correspond to a small number of actual humans who were stealing others' identities, whether those comments correspond one-to-one with actual humans who failed to fill in their own contact information, etc. is an interesting question that's worth discussing, but let's settle the claim you originally made, first, that there were "massive bot campaigns on both sides of the issue." Where is the evidence that there was even a single bot campaign - again, emphasis on bot - on the pro-net-neutrality side? The comment from an FCC spokesman about a "single fake e-mail generator website" refers to fake e-mail addresses (it's a website much like Mailinator). Such addresses could well have been used by real people to send real comments, so this does not necessarily correlate with "fake comments." (For instance, I assume your legal name is not "Ikeboy," so you're using a "fake name" on this website - but that hardly means you're making "fake comments," or that you're part of a bot campaign.)
fortran77 6y ago
And it looks like the bots are downvoting _you_ here on Hacker News for raising a valid and interesting point that goes against the party line.
deleted 6y ago
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by ikeboy 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ikeboy 6y ago

>He said the FCC received more than 7.5 million comments consisting of the same short-form letter supporting the current rules from about 45,000 unique email addresses, “all generated by a single fake e-mail generator website.” He said the FCC received more than 400,000 comments supporting the old rules “from the same address in Russia.”

Arubis 6y ago

And of course, if the tinfoil hat mentality is appealing, why not one actor spamming comments for _both_ sides? If said actor prefers one position they can just have a an order-of-magnitude difference in what they submitted; either way, said hypothetical party can be satisfied with eroding public trust in the process.

ikeboy 6y ago
Perhaps - my own pet theory is it was just some bored guys on 4chan who did it because they could. The thing is, a lot of the bots didn't submit comments directly, which would have required getting keys to submit in bulk and leave a trail. Instead, they filled out forms on the many sites that were set up to take names and submit form letters to the FCC. So some advocacy org might set up a site and get a million comments, half of them might be legit and half might be from a script kiddy running a database of addresses and names through the site, which then submits it to the FCC. The site has no particular incentive to vet the submissions. Knowing the IP address of the entity who sent the message to the FCC is close to useless, in that scenario.
simion314 6y ago
I would consider the scenario where it was not just 1 person/group, you could have more then 1 person trying to cheat the system in favor of his favorite tribe or even just trolls practicing their scripting skills.

rrauenza 6y ago

I found a comment attributed to my parents, asked them about it and they had no idea how it could have happened.

redbeard0x0a 6y ago
my grandmother too, asked her and she had no idea what I was talking about

salawat 6y ago

This is actually a practice I shun. I submitted commentary on behalf of most of the people in my relatively meager social circle, but at a minimum I 'asked' them if it was alright to do so, explained to them the position I was advocating and asked them if they were in alignment enough to be comfortable being included. Scraping names/addresses and blasting comments without actually doing the footwork actually undermines the integrity of the entire thing. For both sides. I won't deny an automated form filler script didn't pass through my mind as an option; but I have a very intense distaste for people who engage in unauthorized proxy behavior, or who subvert other's identities online. Especially now that everyone has thrown out the prevailing common sense of not linking your real life persona to your digital presence. It's one of those lines you just don't cross. Then again, I've been called an anachronism by peers before; and with recent behavior by various large companies (Wells Fargo) taking the initiative to sign people up for things they don't ask for, maybe my brand of professional ethos hasn't aged well.

geofft 6y ago

I don't think the evidence you've posted supports that there were massive bot campaigns. The popular thesis, which the evidence you've presented is consistent with, is - the pro-net-neutrality side organized virtual letter-writing campaigns, getting lots of actual human people to send in pre-written messages they agree with but did not author - the anti-net-neutrality side, unable to find large numbers of actual human people who agreed, used bots to pretend to be lots of people and therefore, to the underlying question of what policy do more actual human people support, we should disregard many more of the received anti-net-neutrality comments.

ikeboy 6y ago
Did you read the WSJ article I linked to? It shows plenty of fake comments submitted by the pro-net-neutrality side. Just asserting that it was only one side who resorted to fake comments is an evidence-free position. I struggle to think how you can characterize 7 million fake comments out of 23 million total that came from a "single fake e-mail generator website" as "the pro-net-neutrality side organized virtual letter-writing campaigns, getting lots of actual human people to send in pre-written messages they agree with but did not author" I get that this narrative is more comfortable for some to believe, but it's plainly contradicted by the facts.
- geofft 6y ago
  The claim you made was, "Friendly reminder that there were massive bot compaigns on both sides of the issue." The claim I made was, "I don't think the evidence you've posted supports that there were massive bot campaigns," bot in italics. You have now changed your claim to be about "fake comments," independent of bots, which is not what we were talking about. Nor did I claim that it was "only one side who resorted to fake comments" - I said "we should disregard many more of the received anti-net-neutrality comments. I did not say that we should disregard zero received pro-net-neutrality comments. It is certainly true that a nonzero number of comments on both sides were fake comments. The question is whether that's a small number or a large number, and whether the numbers are the same (let alone "massive") on both sides. The WSJ article you linked to includes evidence that a number of anti-net-neutrality comments were posted by bots - see the paragraphs starting "Chicago programmer..." - and that a number of pro-net-neutrality comments were posted by humans encouraged to send in pre-canned messages. Those are certainly not "bot campaigns." Whether those comments count as "fake comments," whether those comments correspond to a small number of actual humans who were stealing others' identities, whether those comments correspond one-to-one with actual humans who failed to fill in their own contact information, etc. is an interesting question that's worth discussing, but let's settle the claim you originally made, first, that there were "massive bot campaigns on both sides of the issue." Where is the evidence that there was even a single bot campaign - again, emphasis on bot - on the pro-net-neutrality side? The comment from an FCC spokesman about a "single fake e-mail generator website" refers to fake e-mail addresses (it's a website much like Mailinator). Such addresses could well have been used by real people to send real comments, so this does not necessarily correlate with "fake comments." (For instance, I assume your legal name is not "Ikeboy," so you're using a "fake name" on this website - but that hardly means you're making "fake comments," or that you're part of a bot campaign.)

fortran77 6y ago

And it looks like the bots are downvoting _you_ here on Hacker News for raising a valid and interesting point that goes against the party line.

deleted 6y ago

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