8 ms·

Cable Companies Are Astroturfing Fake Consumer Support to End Net Neutrality

182 points by ghosh 12y ago

dang 12y ago
Url changed from http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/cable-companies-bankroll-fake-consumer-groups-to-end-net-neutrality/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/cable-companies-b..., which points to this.
BugBrother 12y ago
To make a modest proposal, there is a business idea here. Putin's junta has the Swedish (and other minority languages) comment fields filled up with propaganda. The Russian comments are easily recognizable by the opinions (even the left wing extremists in Sweden are upset by 1930s style destabilisation and overtaking of areas in Europe). But at least half the problem is the obviously bad language idioms etc. You can't just translate arguments and use them in all cultural environments. Also, the fake upvotes for the media which accept them are clunky and obvious. It is just not competently done astroturf. All this goes for Chinese and Iranian political astroturfing etc as well. To sell high quality astroturf as a service in different countries should be worth lots of money. Even big countries like Russia struggle to organize the service competently, then they have part time employees which aren't specialized. Edit: I assume that e.g. China, if they don't go democratic, later will add a minority language/culture as work requirement for their armies -- note plural -- of censors. So there is a window of opportunity before some junta implement this and sell the service to other dictators and equally moral companies. (For anyone missing the "modest proposal", this is tongue in cheek. At least mostly.) Edit: Fixed clarity etc.
- rjsw 12y ago
  Israel seems to do astroturfing in english pretty well.
  - BugBrother 12y ago
    That was a not particularly subtle example the other way? :-) Not that it really is relevant, but the other side in that conflict gets a very good showing in Swedish. (E.g. Pallywood or torture between Palestinian groups were straight out censored in Swedish media. Swedes in general have no clue that more Jews were kicked out from the moslem world -- just for their religion, not in a civil war -- than the number of Palestinians which fled/was kicked out. And so on. You can fall off your chair laughing if you follow the Swedish news re Mideast in parallel with BBC/NY Times, which is the main reason I know anything about the subject.)
  - sitkack 12y ago
    Well about half of all Jews speak english better than you or I.
- frozenport 12y ago
  Russia Today did a pretty good job impressing kids.
- msane 12y ago
  I like my humor like I like my wine: dry and produced in a manner which oppresses many people. Honestly though astroturfing is pretty deplorable. A real business proposal is one which uses machine learning to detect it.
  - BugBrother 12y ago
    >> I like my humor like I like my wine: dry and produced in a manner which oppresses many people. Always nice to find a kindred soul. :-) But I really prefer people I don't agree with, arguing teaches me more. >> A real business proposal is one which uses machine learning to detect it. There was a story on HN recently about CIA (NSA? Some TLA) wanting an irony/sarcasm detector. C Stross had lots of fun with it. I guess such a detector would need a full damn General AI -- and probably not even that is enough. Some form of accredited user accounts (HN/slashdot style) could vote for if something should be flagged. I can't see anything better, really. Re the Russian subject, I saw these on FB some time ago: http://www.sptimes.ru/story/38052 http://www.sptimes.ru/story/38052 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/04/pro-russia-trolls-ukraine-guardian-online http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/04/pro-rus... Edit: On consideration, re a detector: This is a type of spam, the comments seem to be written and then translated. The problem is that detectors need to recognize new comments/angles at least every week, maybe more than once a day. And quite quickly it would be rewritten to fool the detectors. I don't believe in automation here, but please prove me wrong.
- tehwebguy 12y ago
  > Russian comments are easily recognizable by the opinions Really? It seems difficult to know without some sort of proof, otherwise there is no telling if you are marking false positives. I don't think this is the same as spam. Spam is low quality and my guess why is to target those that will fall for whatever scam they are selling. My guess is that any actual state sponsored propaganda on website comments would be pretty damn good.
  - BugBrother 12y ago
    OK, some more specifics... For the strange opinions you just don't find -- e.g. conspiracy theories about all the West media being after Russia, which are only written in Putin's controlled media. Then there were claims about Ukrainian right wing extremists (which got really few votes in the last election) and other strange things you only see in Putin's media. Arguments were often just not relevant for Sweden. Like "but what about USA in Iraq" -- that only works in USA (and maybe Britain), if that. Even the Swedes that condemn the Iraq invasion, not so few, of course have no problems ALSO condemning that Russia starts to treat Europe like Hitler in the 1930s; military threats, destabilisation, annexations etc. The Russians avoids all questions about where they were writing from and none claimed to not be Russian. If it was proved where they came from (e.g. logs from the proxies they use, or something), it would automatically be news in Sweden. Then we have the obvious bad Swedish, the first month a lot seemed to be from Google Translate. The bad voting scraping (one comment posted a bit down in a comment tree -- 10-15 top votes in seconds; never happened otherwise). I also posted a couple of links here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865214 And so on... Edit: And about a state's trolling/astroturfing being high quality: First, note the low quality of conspiracy theories from Putin's junta. The personal envoy of Putin, Sergej Markov, yesterday claimed that Sweden, Poland, Finland and the Baltics had Russophobia -- and threatened with a new World War if the countries joined NATO!! And other crazy stuff. That was worse than before 1991 -- and note that it wasn't for internal consumption by Russians only reading Putin's media! Also, see that about starting with Google Translate. There are lots of quite small languages in Western Europe. How do you to a reasonable cost quickly find enough people that know Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, etc, etc? Then you have to train them (or give them stuff to translate and post). Edit 2: I hope the above is readable. Ask otherwise, I might have the energy to continue. Edit 3: The main difference compared to spam is that spam has much less resources, it is much less work intensive. There are maybe one message per 100K receivers. With astroturfing in the end, most (probably not all) comments will be at least partly written individually. If the same comment is posted in many places, e.g. something like Disqus can detect them directly (or Google, for that matter).
- sitkack 12y ago
  I think astroturfing would work best if you did something like a targeted Onion like site, where the cynical members of the population of the people you are trying to turn wrote the propaganda themselves in a "Mother Night" [0] sorta way. The turfers would think they are writing satire when the are really the steel cut gears of vertically integrated oppression. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Night http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Night
iwwr 12y ago
There is some genuine concern about any regulations involving the internet. But the need for Net Belligerence only arises in stifled and monopolized markets. The solution would be to break open the myriad of rules that make it hard for independent ISPs to expand: from local right-of-way's to utility poles to telecom regulations. When bandwidth is expanding in a Moore's law manner, Net Neutrality begins to be less relevant. ISPs under market forces will expand their network capacity to meet demand. It's monopoly ISPs that want to forego that investment to squeeze out content distributors. In the end, even if Net Neutrality is passed, that still leaves entrenched monopoly ISPs with outdated networks (and terrible customer support). Even if the big ISPs get broken up and get forced to inter-connect, there remains the problem of local regulations, right-of-way's and utility poles (local utilities are also monopolies under political control).
- Zigurd 12y ago
  Alternatively, regulate the last mile as a utility and create a wholesale/retail market. Also called "structural separation."
  - hga 12y ago
    I would say that as "further regulate", as in the companies in questions, the cablecos and telcos ("AT&T", Century, Verizon) are already regulated government enabled monopolies.
    - sitkack 12y ago
      They do a pretty good job of regulating government.
      - hga 12y ago
        It would be more accurate to say it's a mutually beneficial relationship.
  - nickff 12y ago
    Is this not what the government did to the telephone companies providing internet services, which subsequently caused them to stop investing in their infrastructure, thus resulting in the current market situation, where only cable companies provide broadband?
nikanj 12y ago
As a person living abroad, I find it quite amusing to watch the struggle for decent internet in the US. The Time Warner / Comcast merger seems to be a done deal, and looks like net neutrality is going away soon. Everyone hates these companies, there's a strong grassroots movement to fix the policies, and you guys actually do deserve better. The amount of corruption evident in these developments is staggering, and yet there seems to be no real possibility of the opposition succeeding in their goals.
- rybosome 12y ago
  I agree completely. It's difficult to watch this without feeling deeply cynical about our particular implementation of democracy. The wants of the wealthy few are being given precedence over the needs of the many.
  - crazy1van 12y ago
    > particular implementation of democracy What about the implementation is causing the results you dislike? I think it may be less the system itself and more the specific choices of voters that are causing the undesirable results.
    - freshhawk 12y ago
      But you don't get to change the voters, only the system (well ... besides re-education camps or similar I guess). So if the specific choices of the voters are consistently against their own interests it has to be the systems fault. POSIWID [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what...
      - crazy1van 12y ago
        Yeah I agree. The citizenry is the citizenry. No changing that. The tricky thing is to design a system where it is more difficult for them to make certain choices (arguably bad ones). Taken too far, you end up without a democracy anymore. Although I think representative government is important, perhaps even more important is the protection of rights of those people not in the majority. You hear this constant drum beat from the American conservatives advocating for more democracy in the world. Certainly, that is an element of a solution. But that alone will just end up with mob rule and life for those outside the mob will be terrible.
twobits 12y ago
In a more abstract pov, govs are not bad, and companies are not bad. It's a false dilemma. BIG govs are bad, and BIG companies are bad. Notice the common attribute? It's about relative power. That's why companies "lose their ideals" (hello google), when they grow big. It's not about inner organization and communication. It's about BIG. The obvious solution for a society, is to limit the maximum power differential between entities. ("We the people", is one such entity.) The actual implementation of that, is left as an exercise to the reader :-) (..But history has shown, that I/we shouldn't be optimistic.)
stretchwithme 12y ago
All the more reason we need proportional representation and the ability to overrule Congress via referendum. The appearance of voter approval needs to be replaced with actual voter approval.
- nitrogen 12y ago
  Any referendum process needs to have a robust way of ensuring that the descriptions of the proposals are unbiased, truthful, and complete. It's easy to make it look like a referendum makes a situation better by using words like "sets" when "changes" is more correct, and by never mentioning the status quo, for example.
  - stretchwithme 12y ago
    The Swiss do it all the time and can vote directly on legislation already passed by the legislative body. It just takes a petition with enough signatures. Yes, people that are dummy can be deceived. There is no system that will ever prevent that. But even dumb people learn to not vote for things that they don't understand.
ilamont 12y ago
Cable companies have been astroturfing the net neutrality issue for years. In the Boston area in 2006, a Verizon astroturfing scheme was blown out of the water when a local blogger became suspicious after receiving a strange email from a local college student (1). Comcast has also employed professionally run astroturfing campaigns to serve its own ends (2). It would not surprise me if both companies have their anonymous shills drop by HN from time to time to pollute the waters. 1. http://borderlinenewtonwaltham.blogspot.com/2006/09/lies-cable-tv-and-patrick-hynes.html http://borderlinenewtonwaltham.blogspot.com/2006/09/lies-cab... 2. http://stopthecap.com/2011/11/15/comcasts-snake-oil-astroturf-operation-pulls-up-stakes-in-longmont/ http://stopthecap.com/2011/11/15/comcasts-snake-oil-astrotur...
milesf 12y ago
I love that we use words like "astroturfing" to soften the behaviour of people (corporations merely being a collection of people acting as one). We used to call it "lying" and "deception" as in "The cable companies have been lying and being deceitful about the net neutrality issue". <sarcasm> So glad we have improved as a society </sarcasm>
zeruch 12y ago
ALL of them need reclassification to common carrier status. Then their exec staffs need to be Clockwork Oranged. We are a laughing stock against the broadband in almst any other industrial state AND we have these mendacious toads astroturfing pure nonsense.

182 points by ghosh 12y ago

dang 12y ago

Url changed from http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/cable-companies-bankroll-fake-consumer-groups-to-end-net-neutrality/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/cable-companies-b..., which points to this.

BugBrother 12y ago

To make a modest proposal, there is a business idea here. Putin's junta has the Swedish (and other minority languages) comment fields filled up with propaganda. The Russian comments are easily recognizable by the opinions (even the left wing extremists in Sweden are upset by 1930s style destabilisation and overtaking of areas in Europe). But at least half the problem is the obviously bad language idioms etc. You can't just translate arguments and use them in all cultural environments. Also, the fake upvotes for the media which accept them are clunky and obvious. It is just not competently done astroturf. All this goes for Chinese and Iranian political astroturfing etc as well. To sell high quality astroturf as a service in different countries should be worth lots of money. Even big countries like Russia struggle to organize the service competently, then they have part time employees which aren't specialized. Edit: I assume that e.g. China, if they don't go democratic, later will add a minority language/culture as work requirement for their armies -- note plural -- of censors. So there is a window of opportunity before some junta implement this and sell the service to other dictators and equally moral companies. (For anyone missing the "modest proposal", this is tongue in cheek. At least mostly.) Edit: Fixed clarity etc.

rjsw 12y ago
Israel seems to do astroturfing in english pretty well.
- BugBrother 12y ago
  That was a not particularly subtle example the other way? :-) Not that it really is relevant, but the other side in that conflict gets a very good showing in Swedish. (E.g. Pallywood or torture between Palestinian groups were straight out censored in Swedish media. Swedes in general have no clue that more Jews were kicked out from the moslem world -- just for their religion, not in a civil war -- than the number of Palestinians which fled/was kicked out. And so on. You can fall off your chair laughing if you follow the Swedish news re Mideast in parallel with BBC/NY Times, which is the main reason I know anything about the subject.)
- sitkack 12y ago
  Well about half of all Jews speak english better than you or I.
frozenport 12y ago
Russia Today did a pretty good job impressing kids.
msane 12y ago
I like my humor like I like my wine: dry and produced in a manner which oppresses many people. Honestly though astroturfing is pretty deplorable. A real business proposal is one which uses machine learning to detect it.
- BugBrother 12y ago
  >> I like my humor like I like my wine: dry and produced in a manner which oppresses many people. Always nice to find a kindred soul. :-) But I really prefer people I don't agree with, arguing teaches me more. >> A real business proposal is one which uses machine learning to detect it. There was a story on HN recently about CIA (NSA? Some TLA) wanting an irony/sarcasm detector. C Stross had lots of fun with it. I guess such a detector would need a full damn General AI -- and probably not even that is enough. Some form of accredited user accounts (HN/slashdot style) could vote for if something should be flagged. I can't see anything better, really. Re the Russian subject, I saw these on FB some time ago: http://www.sptimes.ru/story/38052 http://www.sptimes.ru/story/38052 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/04/pro-russia-trolls-ukraine-guardian-online http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/04/pro-rus... Edit: On consideration, re a detector: This is a type of spam, the comments seem to be written and then translated. The problem is that detectors need to recognize new comments/angles at least every week, maybe more than once a day. And quite quickly it would be rewritten to fool the detectors. I don't believe in automation here, but please prove me wrong.
tehwebguy 12y ago
> Russian comments are easily recognizable by the opinions Really? It seems difficult to know without some sort of proof, otherwise there is no telling if you are marking false positives. I don't think this is the same as spam. Spam is low quality and my guess why is to target those that will fall for whatever scam they are selling. My guess is that any actual state sponsored propaganda on website comments would be pretty damn good.
- BugBrother 12y ago
  OK, some more specifics... For the strange opinions you just don't find -- e.g. conspiracy theories about all the West media being after Russia, which are only written in Putin's controlled media. Then there were claims about Ukrainian right wing extremists (which got really few votes in the last election) and other strange things you only see in Putin's media. Arguments were often just not relevant for Sweden. Like "but what about USA in Iraq" -- that only works in USA (and maybe Britain), if that. Even the Swedes that condemn the Iraq invasion, not so few, of course have no problems ALSO condemning that Russia starts to treat Europe like Hitler in the 1930s; military threats, destabilisation, annexations etc. The Russians avoids all questions about where they were writing from and none claimed to not be Russian. If it was proved where they came from (e.g. logs from the proxies they use, or something), it would automatically be news in Sweden. Then we have the obvious bad Swedish, the first month a lot seemed to be from Google Translate. The bad voting scraping (one comment posted a bit down in a comment tree -- 10-15 top votes in seconds; never happened otherwise). I also posted a couple of links here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865214 And so on... Edit: And about a state's trolling/astroturfing being high quality: First, note the low quality of conspiracy theories from Putin's junta. The personal envoy of Putin, Sergej Markov, yesterday claimed that Sweden, Poland, Finland and the Baltics had Russophobia -- and threatened with a new World War if the countries joined NATO!! And other crazy stuff. That was worse than before 1991 -- and note that it wasn't for internal consumption by Russians only reading Putin's media! Also, see that about starting with Google Translate. There are lots of quite small languages in Western Europe. How do you to a reasonable cost quickly find enough people that know Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, etc, etc? Then you have to train them (or give them stuff to translate and post). Edit 2: I hope the above is readable. Ask otherwise, I might have the energy to continue. Edit 3: The main difference compared to spam is that spam has much less resources, it is much less work intensive. There are maybe one message per 100K receivers. With astroturfing in the end, most (probably not all) comments will be at least partly written individually. If the same comment is posted in many places, e.g. something like Disqus can detect them directly (or Google, for that matter).
sitkack 12y ago
I think astroturfing would work best if you did something like a targeted Onion like site, where the cynical members of the population of the people you are trying to turn wrote the propaganda themselves in a "Mother Night" [0] sorta way. The turfers would think they are writing satire when the are really the steel cut gears of vertically integrated oppression. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Night http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Night

iwwr 12y ago

There is some genuine concern about any regulations involving the internet. But the need for Net Belligerence only arises in stifled and monopolized markets. The solution would be to break open the myriad of rules that make it hard for independent ISPs to expand: from local right-of-way's to utility poles to telecom regulations. When bandwidth is expanding in a Moore's law manner, Net Neutrality begins to be less relevant. ISPs under market forces will expand their network capacity to meet demand. It's monopoly ISPs that want to forego that investment to squeeze out content distributors. In the end, even if Net Neutrality is passed, that still leaves entrenched monopoly ISPs with outdated networks (and terrible customer support). Even if the big ISPs get broken up and get forced to inter-connect, there remains the problem of local regulations, right-of-way's and utility poles (local utilities are also monopolies under political control).

Zigurd 12y ago
Alternatively, regulate the last mile as a utility and create a wholesale/retail market. Also called "structural separation."
- hga 12y ago
  I would say that as "further regulate", as in the companies in questions, the cablecos and telcos ("AT&T", Century, Verizon) are already regulated government enabled monopolies.
  - sitkack 12y ago
    They do a pretty good job of regulating government.
    - hga 12y ago
      It would be more accurate to say it's a mutually beneficial relationship.
- nickff 12y ago
  Is this not what the government did to the telephone companies providing internet services, which subsequently caused them to stop investing in their infrastructure, thus resulting in the current market situation, where only cable companies provide broadband?

nikanj 12y ago

As a person living abroad, I find it quite amusing to watch the struggle for decent internet in the US. The Time Warner / Comcast merger seems to be a done deal, and looks like net neutrality is going away soon. Everyone hates these companies, there's a strong grassroots movement to fix the policies, and you guys actually do deserve better. The amount of corruption evident in these developments is staggering, and yet there seems to be no real possibility of the opposition succeeding in their goals.

rybosome 12y ago
I agree completely. It's difficult to watch this without feeling deeply cynical about our particular implementation of democracy. The wants of the wealthy few are being given precedence over the needs of the many.
- crazy1van 12y ago
  > particular implementation of democracy What about the implementation is causing the results you dislike? I think it may be less the system itself and more the specific choices of voters that are causing the undesirable results.
  - freshhawk 12y ago
    But you don't get to change the voters, only the system (well ... besides re-education camps or similar I guess). So if the specific choices of the voters are consistently against their own interests it has to be the systems fault. POSIWID [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what...
    - crazy1van 12y ago
      Yeah I agree. The citizenry is the citizenry. No changing that. The tricky thing is to design a system where it is more difficult for them to make certain choices (arguably bad ones). Taken too far, you end up without a democracy anymore. Although I think representative government is important, perhaps even more important is the protection of rights of those people not in the majority. You hear this constant drum beat from the American conservatives advocating for more democracy in the world. Certainly, that is an element of a solution. But that alone will just end up with mob rule and life for those outside the mob will be terrible.

twobits 12y ago

In a more abstract pov, govs are not bad, and companies are not bad. It's a false dilemma. BIG govs are bad, and BIG companies are bad. Notice the common attribute? It's about relative power. That's why companies "lose their ideals" (hello google), when they grow big. It's not about inner organization and communication. It's about BIG. The obvious solution for a society, is to limit the maximum power differential between entities. ("We the people", is one such entity.) The actual implementation of that, is left as an exercise to the reader :-) (..But history has shown, that I/we shouldn't be optimistic.)

stretchwithme 12y ago

All the more reason we need proportional representation and the ability to overrule Congress via referendum. The appearance of voter approval needs to be replaced with actual voter approval.

nitrogen 12y ago
Any referendum process needs to have a robust way of ensuring that the descriptions of the proposals are unbiased, truthful, and complete. It's easy to make it look like a referendum makes a situation better by using words like "sets" when "changes" is more correct, and by never mentioning the status quo, for example.
- stretchwithme 12y ago
  The Swiss do it all the time and can vote directly on legislation already passed by the legislative body. It just takes a petition with enough signatures. Yes, people that are dummy can be deceived. There is no system that will ever prevent that. But even dumb people learn to not vote for things that they don't understand.

ilamont 12y ago

Cable companies have been astroturfing the net neutrality issue for years. In the Boston area in 2006, a Verizon astroturfing scheme was blown out of the water when a local blogger became suspicious after receiving a strange email from a local college student (1). Comcast has also employed professionally run astroturfing campaigns to serve its own ends (2). It would not surprise me if both companies have their anonymous shills drop by HN from time to time to pollute the waters. 1. http://borderlinenewtonwaltham.blogspot.com/2006/09/lies-cable-tv-and-patrick-hynes.html http://borderlinenewtonwaltham.blogspot.com/2006/09/lies-cab... 2. http://stopthecap.com/2011/11/15/comcasts-snake-oil-astroturf-operation-pulls-up-stakes-in-longmont/ http://stopthecap.com/2011/11/15/comcasts-snake-oil-astrotur...

milesf 12y ago

I love that we use words like "astroturfing" to soften the behaviour of people (corporations merely being a collection of people acting as one). We used to call it "lying" and "deception" as in "The cable companies have been lying and being deceitful about the net neutrality issue". <sarcasm> So glad we have improved as a society </sarcasm>

zeruch 12y ago

ALL of them need reclassification to common carrier status. Then their exec staffs need to be Clockwork Oranged. We are a laughing stock against the broadband in almst any other industrial state AND we have these mendacious toads astroturfing pure nonsense.