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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 wh

by 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 is an interesting question that's worth discussing, but let's settle the claim you originally made, first, that there were "massive bot campaigns on both sides of the issue."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.)
- ikeboy 6y ago
  >Where is the evidence that there was even a single bot campaign - again, emphasis on bot - on the pro-net-neutrality side? There's plenty: >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.” You presented the "Chicago programmer" analysis as proof of bot activity. In the linked blog post, they say: >A number of journalists have tried to trace where this message is coming from, and the best guess seems to be the Council for Individual Freedom. This was a mentioned in a recent Gizmodo article, where the organization claimed that they were running an ad campaign that directed users to a form, and they provided a screenshot of that form. This is the same thing that many of the pro NN organizations were doing. Under what definition are you implying that a single message submitted 300k times wasn't a bot but the other ones discussed are? Again: >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.” This is on average each email being used over 100 times. You think 7 million Americans: A. Know how to use email generator websites B. Decided to all use a particular website C. Sent the same form letter while using said website and D. Happened to choose the same name as 100 other people on average? This is just not a credible claim. I'm sure you've got a perfectly innocent non-bot explanation for this as well: >He said the FCC received more than 400,000 comments supporting the old rules “from the same address in Russia.”
  - geofft 6y ago
    > 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.” This is consistent with my claim: "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." There is not enough detail in the WSJ article to distinguish between scenario 1, Ms. Burney having clicked on a thing that says "take action now to support net neutrality!" which sent a message under her name that she didn't write and no longer remembers, and scenario 2, Ms. Burney not having been involved at all, not wanting to have submitted a comment, but happening to agree with a message she never submitted. Both are plausible under the evidence, and we know there were sites that let people submit pre-written letters to the FCC and asked only for some contact info. I am claiming that scenario 1 is plausible and nothing in the article contradicts it. What we know about Ms. Burney is that, first, she's familiar enough with the rules to have an opinion, and second, she "never wrote that." That's exactly what we'd expect from someone who sent in a pre-written comment. If you want to argue that comments in scenario 1 count as "fake" comments for some reason, sure, we can discuss that, but first let's settle the claim you made, that these were "bot campaigns." Only in scenario 2 could it have been a "bot campaign." > Under what definition are you implying that a single message submitted 300k times wasn't a bot but the other ones discussed are? The definition that 300K real human people clicked a form and provided (or at least were directed to provide, and usually did provide) their own contact information, signing a pre-written message that they agreed with but did not author. > You think 7 million Americans: A. Know how to use email generator websites B. Decided to all use a particular website C. Sent the same form letter while using said website and D. Happened to choose the same name as 100 other people on average? Yes. From the evidence we have, we know there were massive organized campaigns to get large numbers of Americans to submit, of their own agency, pre-written letters from the FCC. So it's not merely that it's theoretically possible, we have strong evidence for B and C, at least. I'd have to dig up the report to see what happened, but a plausible scenario here for A is that one of these campaigns said something like "Your e-mail address will be public record, you may want to generate a throwaway address," and either it linked to this "fake e-mail generator website" or it was first on Google. In turn, for D, it's also entirely plausible that that website uses a low-entropy random email generator, such that it couldn't generate more than 45,000 email addresses and therefore had collisions. What's your scenario? That a bot generated all these emails and used a third-party e-mail address generator website (instead of, say, generating its own emails)? Did the third-party e-mail address generator website have an API, or did the bot scrape it 45,000 times, decide that that was enough addresses, and then submit seven million comments? > He said the FCC received more than 400,000 comments supporting the old rules “from the same address in Russia.” E-mail address? IP address? Mailing address? In particular, is your claim that a Russian bot campaign sent a bunch of letters to the FCC identifying itself as from Russia, knowing full well that the FCC takes into account only comments from America? How does that make any sense? I don't have an explanation, but I don't think you do, either, and you don't have enough evidence to call it a "bot campaign."

by ikeboy 6y ago

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.)

ikeboy 6y ago
>Where is the evidence that there was even a single bot campaign - again, emphasis on bot - on the pro-net-neutrality side? There's plenty: >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.” You presented the "Chicago programmer" analysis as proof of bot activity. In the linked blog post, they say: >A number of journalists have tried to trace where this message is coming from, and the best guess seems to be the Council for Individual Freedom. This was a mentioned in a recent Gizmodo article, where the organization claimed that they were running an ad campaign that directed users to a form, and they provided a screenshot of that form. This is the same thing that many of the pro NN organizations were doing. Under what definition are you implying that a single message submitted 300k times wasn't a bot but the other ones discussed are? Again: >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.” This is on average each email being used over 100 times. You think 7 million Americans: A. Know how to use email generator websites B. Decided to all use a particular website C. Sent the same form letter while using said website and D. Happened to choose the same name as 100 other people on average? This is just not a credible claim. I'm sure you've got a perfectly innocent non-bot explanation for this as well: >He said the FCC received more than 400,000 comments supporting the old rules “from the same address in Russia.”
- geofft 6y ago
  > 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.” This is consistent with my claim: "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." There is not enough detail in the WSJ article to distinguish between scenario 1, Ms. Burney having clicked on a thing that says "take action now to support net neutrality!" which sent a message under her name that she didn't write and no longer remembers, and scenario 2, Ms. Burney not having been involved at all, not wanting to have submitted a comment, but happening to agree with a message she never submitted. Both are plausible under the evidence, and we know there were sites that let people submit pre-written letters to the FCC and asked only for some contact info. I am claiming that scenario 1 is plausible and nothing in the article contradicts it. What we know about Ms. Burney is that, first, she's familiar enough with the rules to have an opinion, and second, she "never wrote that." That's exactly what we'd expect from someone who sent in a pre-written comment. If you want to argue that comments in scenario 1 count as "fake" comments for some reason, sure, we can discuss that, but first let's settle the claim you made, that these were "bot campaigns." Only in scenario 2 could it have been a "bot campaign." > Under what definition are you implying that a single message submitted 300k times wasn't a bot but the other ones discussed are? The definition that 300K real human people clicked a form and provided (or at least were directed to provide, and usually did provide) their own contact information, signing a pre-written message that they agreed with but did not author. > You think 7 million Americans: A. Know how to use email generator websites B. Decided to all use a particular website C. Sent the same form letter while using said website and D. Happened to choose the same name as 100 other people on average? Yes. From the evidence we have, we know there were massive organized campaigns to get large numbers of Americans to submit, of their own agency, pre-written letters from the FCC. So it's not merely that it's theoretically possible, we have strong evidence for B and C, at least. I'd have to dig up the report to see what happened, but a plausible scenario here for A is that one of these campaigns said something like "Your e-mail address will be public record, you may want to generate a throwaway address," and either it linked to this "fake e-mail generator website" or it was first on Google. In turn, for D, it's also entirely plausible that that website uses a low-entropy random email generator, such that it couldn't generate more than 45,000 email addresses and therefore had collisions. What's your scenario? That a bot generated all these emails and used a third-party e-mail address generator website (instead of, say, generating its own emails)? Did the third-party e-mail address generator website have an API, or did the bot scrape it 45,000 times, decide that that was enough addresses, and then submit seven million comments? > He said the FCC received more than 400,000 comments supporting the old rules “from the same address in Russia.” E-mail address? IP address? Mailing address? In particular, is your claim that a Russian bot campaign sent a bunch of letters to the FCC identifying itself as from Russia, knowing full well that the FCC takes into account only comments from America? How does that make any sense? I don't have an explanation, but I don't think you do, either, and you don't have enough evidence to call it a "bot campaign."