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Google vs. Boilerplate Activism
ArmorFiend writes with this NYTimes article which "details the efforts of journalists to discern real reader-written letters from boilerplate form letters. Seems like there should be a centralized searchable DB of letters to the editor."
The story mentions Google once and only really as a secondary topic (if that), and it put in the Slashdot story title?
... if I write a letter to my congresscritter supporting an issue, I support that issue whether or not the original words are entirely mine. After all, presidents use speechwriters -- and this is entirely accepted as the norm (though Lincoln often wrote his own, but that's an abberation.) And yet we say that the president himself (or herself, someday in the future) supports the issue. Why should members of the public be ignored just because they have speechwriters, of a sort? It's the opinion that matters, not the form of the opinion, as long as it's not threatening or rude to another person.
i am a soviet space shuttle
need a centralized searchable DB of trolls to discern real reader-written trolls from boilerplate form trolls.
How about a filter that adds a bit of lexical noise to each email to the congressman or editor? A proxy service? Hmm, lobbying and such are big business, market opportunity anyone?
Why should a sentiment be trivialized just because the sender decided to use a statement that was prepared by another? Many people are either not verbally eloquent or lack the confidence to write in their own words. If a person agrees with what they send, shouldn't that be the determinant? We sign contracts we didn't write all the time. How is this any different?
Boilerplate activism is one of the greatest inventions ever. As the head of a non-profit group based in NY (can't say which, legal reasons), it is tremendously easy to provide a boilerplate to people concerned about issues rather than make them write an individual letter.
If we were to make them write an individual letter, with the state our society has collectively fallen into, I'd estimate about 2-3% of the current correspondence mailed would still be mailed.
Editors and Lobbyists Wage High-Tech War Over Letters
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
Jennifer 8. Lee??!?!?
There are so many vulnerabilities to the news media's meme filters. Check out the list at sniggle.net for instance.
In this arms race, like that with copy protection and access restriction schemes, the advantage is all in favor of the clever crackers I think.
When form letters get well-filtered, algorithmically-generated letters a la the Dada Engine will step up to the plate. From there, the race will be on.
Quiquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
"Editors say some readers simply do not understand the ethical issues of sending a letter written by someone else. "They had no idea that they were bending any sort of rules whatsoever or that they were trying to put one over on us," Ms. Clotfelter said. "I e-mailed back and forth with one woman who was distressed that we wouldn't print her letter because it was really how she felt."
OK, that is how the lady felt, but it wasn't her letter. If she really felt that strongly about something, she should put her own words down. Even if a boilerplate version is thrust under her nose, write about it in her own words. I don't care how carefully crafted a letter someone else has written for you, it isn't your letter. It may express the same thoughts, but not in just the way you would express them.
"Others defend their use of form letters. "I've seen the same thing from the other side," said Trevor D. Carlson, who signed one of the pro-Bush form letters to The Press Democrat."
ROFL! Oh, so then it's OK. After all, we all know that if the other side does it it must be OK to do it too.
Moral thinking? Perish the thought!
-------
E-mail written by a human being:
"How are you doin? I was hanging oout with aunt sally today and you should see her goiter! its the size of a watermelon... and mabel says blah blah blah..."
E-mail compiled by a spam program:
"HEY misterbigpants@mailservice.com, increase your penis size TODAY! CLICK HERE for more details! LADJF43253K42LJ34L3K23JK4."
So you can see, humans have about as much interesting things to say as spam does. Maybe even more; I'm way more inclined to make my penis bigger than to hear the droll minutae of my family's lives. Who isn't?
~D:
When they have hundreds of people showing up at their office, they can't hit the delete key.
Fight Spammers!
While I can understand the frustration with boilerplate letters to the editor, I personally feel that boilerplate letters to our members of congress is a good thing.
I am glad grass roots organizations bring to my attention issues that are important to me, and I have taken the time to print off a form letter, sign it and mail it off to my senators and representative.
The corporations use big money to influence government, the grass roots people should use whatever means they have to get us to speak up, even if it is just a click away...
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
It's the result of a terrible incident involving a strange polynomial and an unusual quantity of alcohol. Best just to not bring it up in the future.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
The local rag has a "call the editors" section... and in it you will find the most idiotic thoughts expressed in the worst english possible; but once the barrier of entry (e.g. having to find paper, envelope, and a stamp, and then being able to write legibly) has been lowered so much, all sorts of half-baked opinions are voiced.
Editors should realize that if you are not literate enought to paraphrase your cause's main points in your own words, your opinion doesn't deserve being printed.
Why not take it a step further, have it check the database and filter out the noise?
http://www.remix.net/
Here is a guy using google to find out that a journalist's "normal american citizen" source is actually an activist, and a history teacher to boot.
Using google to fact check people is a part of life now - and I love it.
Donut
Buran, "Letters to the editor" are intended and presumed to be the genuine thoughts of the letter writer. A form letter may convey your feelings, but it's not your letter, and so it's not genuine. We expect people to sign their name to their own words.
Given the example in the news article, sign the letter "Republican National Committee, ditto'd by Buran." That we you stay honest and everyone knows the true nature and history of the letter.
More importantly, if you can't take five minutes to put your own thoughts into a letter, how passionately can you really be about a given issue? Authentic (original) letter writing creates a natural weeding process that pushes less important issues into the background and that is a good thing. Mass-produced letters create an artificial and false impression that issues are more strongly felt and realized in society than they really are. It brings politics, money and marketing campaigns to the newspaper opinion page, where they don't belong -- unless opinions by such forces are honestly divulged.
As far as I know, most newspapers subscribe to Lexis-Nexis (a pay service). And I have successfully searched Lexis-Nexis for letters to the editor in the past.
It really depends on what a particular newspaper archives.
But, since most newspaper letter columns state that submitted letters become the property of the newspaper, there should be no copyright issues stemming from Tasini vs. NYTimes to prevent the letters from being archived.
In other words, the information is already there; the papers just have to check it!
Remember when Microsoft supported a 'grassroots' campaign to have people write in to their local newspaper and talk about how they supported Microsoft during the anti-trust trial?
These journalists are working to make sure they don't get played like that. And of course, clever public relations professionals are always trying to make boilerplate look less like boilerplate...
Advertising is drying up, pure and simple. Most modern ads don't even list the advantages of their product in a traditional manner.
P.R. is the new advertising...in the future, it will be very difficult to tell genuine product reviews from laudatory PR copy. Sophisticated PR will lead to the collapse of trust in the media-and I welcome it! People trust the media far too much already...
here's a tip from me to you: if your local news is reporting about 'a miracle diet,' or a 'revolutionary new (fat/aging/heart attack) fighter', they are just lazily barfing up public relations. learn to recognize PR, and educate your friends about it. maybe in the future, you will be able to make money determining which media outlets are legit, and which are paved in Astroturf..
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
If you want to publish some good news here and it's under password - reprint it if you can do it legally or forget about it.
Otherwise your link is a free way to advertise the closed commercial source of information.
I am not sure, why Slashdot editors allow such free ads here? Or is NY-Times a hidden sponsor of Slashdot?
Less is more !
Won't purveyors of such formletters now just use the standard "search engines don't come here" methods? Seems like the NYTimes just made its job a little harder...
Why should a sentiment be trivialized just because the sender decided to use a statement that was prepared by another? Many people are either not verbally eloquent or lack the confidence to write in their own words. If a person agrees with what they send, shouldn't that be the determinant? We sign contracts we didn't write all the time. How is this any different?
Signed, teamhasnoi
PS. This is why. It's lame. I want to hear the words of the person sending the letter - I can then determine if they actually know what they are taliking about, if they have a personal stake in the issue, if they have even done any research - or if they are another monkey banging on a Brother Word Processor. If you can't take the time to form your own words about something you believe in enough to send a letter/email about, how can I be sure that the issue and the reasons and situations behind it are fixed in your mind?
Why doesn't the NYT hook up with the same people who are checking term papers and thesis papers for cheating - IIRC, they had a database of every paper that anyone ever turned in - it then checked new papers against the DB to see if there were matching word patterns or entire paragraphs lifted. The link escapes me, but it was posted here last year sometime...
It has come to my attention that your product: insert product name sucks major hot balls. I feel as though your company has ripped my ass wide open and violated my dignity. I would like a refund for $insert amount. If I am not satisfied with the response I get I will tell my friends never to buy insert product name again.
I look forward to hearing from you on this matter.
Thank you the applications for this are limitless! 1.Create Boilerplate
2.???
3.Profit!
Everyone copy and paste this letter and send it to the Republican National Committee
:Dear Republican National Committee,
I am opposed to your use of form letters in your activists efforts. I think people should express their own opinions in their own words.
Sincerely,
(insert your name here)
I saw this on Yahoo earlier today.
Yahoo link
Hey, you can win a T-shirt or a cooler if you get enough of their letters published in your local papers.
For you who do not wanna bother, I post the meat here...(I cleaned up the HTML a bit in my editor)
Jim Dyke, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said the committee is proud of its outreach efforts. "You want to make it easy for them to participate," he said. "That is a good thing."
Lisa Boyce, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, said, "If an editor receives 10 letters that may be the same, they at least know there are 10 people that are concerned about the issue and would take the time to send a letter."
The people who edit the letters pages disagree, generally believing that letters should be the work of those who sign them. Armed with Internet search engines and e-mail lists of their own, they are mapping Web sites and alerting each other about the form letters appearing in their mailboxes.
"We type phrases into Google all the time," said Susan Clotfelter, the letters editor at The Denver Post. "We hate to be fooled." The Post published at least two form letters last year: one in support of the budget proposal of President Bush and one in support of the terrorism stance of Senator Tom Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota.
Organized letter-writing campaigns have been around for decades. But the Internet has sped up both their scope and pace. At any time, editors are being bombarded by at least two or three campaigns covering any range of topics, among them immigration, school prayer and politics in general. The large campaigns are easier to spot because many identical letters appear at once. It is the isolated letter that editors have to keep an eye out for.
The editors issue alerts and queries on a 600-member e-mail list run by the National Conference of Editorial Writers. Last week, for example, an editor from Nebraska posted a questionable letter about the Pledge of Allegiance and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Within minutes, editors from Wisconsin, Tennessee, Illinois and Nebraska responded, saying they had received the same letter.
"It's instant communication among us," said Lynnell Burkett, the editorial page editor of The San Antonio Express-News. "It's extremely helpful, every day, several times a day."
Despite these efforts, some form letters still sneak into print. One letter praising President Bush, distributed by the Republican National Committee at the www .gopteamleader.com site, has appeared in more than 20 papers since Jan. 8, including The Boston Globe, The Cincinnati Post, The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Press-Democrat of Santa Rosa, Calif., and The Star Press of Muncie, Ind. The letter begins, "When it comes to the economy, President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership."
Several editors said the letter had slipped through partially because it seemed specifically tailored for letters pages. "It was timely," said J. R. Hill, an editorial writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. "It was short. We didn't need to do a lot of heavy editing. It stuck to basically one point."
"We were burned," she said.
Editors say some readers simply do not understand the ethical issues of sending a letter written by someone else. "They had no idea that they were bending any sort of rules whatsoever or that they were trying to put one over on us," Ms. Clotfelter said. "I e-mailed back and forth with one woman who was distressed that we wouldn't print her letter because it was really how she felt."
Others defend their use of form letters. "I've seen the same thing from the other side," said Trevor D. Carlson, who signed one of the pro-Bush form letters to The Press Democrat.
Editors say the groups are becoming more sophisticated and the letters harder to spot. Last week, The Wisconsin State Journal of Madison received a number of letters in support of abortion rights that referred to the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision recognizing a constitutional right to abortion.
The editors were suspicious. But no two letters were exactly alike. A few technical errors in some of the later e-mails, however, showed that they had come from www.ppwi.org, operated by Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin.
At its Web site, users were encouraged to mix and match paragraphs from about 10 form letters. They could send their newly created letters to any of a number of publications in Wisconsin.
The complexity and the creativity of the site surprised Tim Kelley, the paper's editorial page editor. "Maybe you can call them genuine letters because they are encouraged to cut-and-paste," he said.
Methinks they oughta use an autocorrelation filter so that they can compare replies against each other, using a "rotational" algorithm to compare emails against others, so that it will illuminate likenesses in whichever parts that one email as it compares to others. If the filter detects spikes in the likenesses, it would flag it. With current systems capabilities of performing real-time MPEG, I think this is quite do-able.
.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
I have wanted to make a quick application that searches google using an automated, user definable sub-set of words as a string of a larger work to try and find other works by an author or discover if something might be derivative of another work.
For example:
"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their counry"
My app, with a user defined word sub string of 4 would first search for:
"Now is the time"
"is the time for"
"the time for all"
"time for all good"
"for all good men"
etc...
until it had searched for the entire thing 4 words at a time.
It would collect the urls of say the first 50 matches for each sub string and then correlate which urls had multiple sub strings appearing.
The url with the most hits would likely be the document or the document the one I was analyzing came from.
You would tune the number of words in the sub-string to try and filter out non matches or find more matches if you were not finding enough.
That is was my quick idea for finding documents that were plagerize or maybe other works by a letter writer.
I think with google's open api it could be done pretty easy, next free week I get I will write it maybe. Any feedback on my logic here would be appreciated of course.
Just an idea.
Cheers
Wax on, wax off baby!
Sincerely, Noren
The general convention of a letter is that the person who signs it is the person who wrote it.
This sort of tactic doesn't necessarily trivialize the sentiment, but it sure trivializes the method of communication.
If writing in one's own words is such an intellectual burden that one can't be bothered to do it, can one be trusted to actually read an understand the boilerplate with which one allegedly agrees?
I think there's a difference between letters to the editor and other kinds of communication mentioned in the article, such as letters to congressional representatives. When you send a letter to your representative or senator, you're really just voting, in a way. I don't think they really read them -- they just tabulate for and against on specific issues. The fact that the internet makes it easier for people to participate in this kind of democracy is great (as long as people read the letters they sign). Amnesty International has a program called Freedom Writers which is very similar, and I don't think anyone would want a dictator to ignore a landslide of letters in support of a political prisoner, just because it was obvious astroturfing by Amnesty International
But letters to the editor are treated as if they come from individuals. So, while encouraging people to write to their newspapers is one thing, encouraging them to write this to their newspaper, because the audience of these letters is partly the editors but also partly the general public, seems much more like the creation of propaganda -- like hiring actors to say something everywhere everyday until people believe it's true because they keep hearing it. Insofar as editors are paying attention to public opinion they should take these letters into account, but their job is, I hope, to be more thoughtful than that.
When it comes to the economy, President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership. The economic growth package he recently proposed takes us in the right direction by accelerating the successful tax cuts of 2001, providing marriage penalty relief, and providing incentives for individuals and small businesses to save and invest.
Contrary to the class warfare rhetoric attacking the President's plan, the proposal helps everyone who pays taxes, and especially the middle class. This year alone, 92 million taxpayers will receive an immediate tax cut averaging $1,083 and 46 million married couples will get back an average of $1,714. That's not pocket change for a family struggling through uncertain economic times. Combined with the president's new initiatives to help the unemployed, this plan gets people back to work and helps every sector of our economy.
Click on the links. You will find many people agree with me.
Back a few years ago while I was in college, a friend and I ran a little humor club of sorts... Our "publications" were few, but we thought they were pretty quality...
Anyway, in the parody that we made of our school's website, we encouraged people to use Scott Pakin's automatic complaint-letter generator to generate letters to submit to our school paper as letters to the editor. As it turns out, I was reading said paper a few months later, and came across a very familiar writing style... We got quite a kick out of it.
ahh... memories.
Do not read this sig.
Why are they only mentioning that generally conservative groups are using this tactic? Could it be because liberal groups don't need to write letters, because the NYT already presents their views? True, they do mention "the other side", but not until paragraph 14, whereas the RNC and PP are mentioned in paragraph 2.
I've seen "preprogrammed letters" to congressmen or news organizations on a variety of issues, and with views throughout the range of the political spectrum. Why would they single out the RNC and PP? Just curious.
On the other hand, you're likely to be much more convincing when it's clear that you're capable of formulating and articulating an argument without repetitiously spouting the boilerplate catch phrases of others...
a world in progress...
People remember that the Letters to the Editor is used for lining of the Bird cage or other animal cages or a sfish wrapper..
for obvious reasons..:)
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Twenty people submitting original essays, or twenty-thousand people sending the same message?
What next? Newspapers and other news agencies printing press releases from corporations verbatim and claiming they are news?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
at least *nominally* original. They don't hand a copy of the speach out to each member of Congress who then stands up and repeats it, one after the other.
Congresscritters employ their *own* speach writers to massage the speach to appear as their own.
KFG
Try and explain to your mom how important copyright length limitation is to the freedom of ideas. Done? Now, expect her to write the San Francisco Chronicle or her congressman, with an original interpretation of what you just said.
Has your head exploded yet?
Perhaps it would be more reasonable, if we're going to see boilerplate activism, to have a given form letter signed by people who agree with its content, assuming their addresses and names are truthful (and that can be checked).
Consider two scenarios:
1. 5 people who go to great effort to explain themselves write their congressman or local paper about issue X.
2. 10,000 people all sign on to a common belief platform/letter, and that is sent to a local paper or congressman.
The five who send in original letters will make more unique points and may illustrate ideas that the media or congress hasn't thought of. 10,000 signatures in a district, however, hits a hell of a lot closer to home in a war of numbers and votes.
Don't discount the form letter unless you're willing to write every thought you feel the world should understand, uniquely, AND expect all of the people you know to do the same. They have jobs, kids, and a life too...
Politicians and other public figures use some rules of thumb about letter writing campaigns that let them gauge the issue's importance to their people 'back home'. One of those rules is that there are X times more people with an opinion than the number of letter writers for each type of letter recieved.
These rules have different levels for 'letters to the editor', 'email to my congresscritter' and 'handwritten letter to my congresscritter'.
What the boilerplate shops are trying to do is 'game' those rules for judging the importance of letters: They lower the threshold for sending a letter (thus making the X factor smaller) while convincing the target that it belongs to a category with a larger X factor. Thus the target believes that the issue is significantly more important to his constituency than it actually is.
This is the basic dishonesty of boilerplate letter campaigns.
If making a centralized DB could solve the problem, we wouldn't see so many repeated stories on
getSexySig();
I'm a volunteer for a UK site that enables citizens to fax/email their Member of Parliament. We are a non-profit organisation that exists because (a) we think being able to contact one's elected representative through the net is important and (b) Parliament, being the technophobic fools that they are, still haven't got around to implementing a real equivalent.
Boilerplate form letters are a major threat to our service. Part of our FAQ pleads with users on the topic:
If you're a pressure group, please think about what you're doing. If you encourage all your members to write to the same MP, you will not show that MP the depth of support for your issue. You'll simply have used up a few sheets of tax-funded fax paper, and irritated an underpaid secretary or researcher. And if you encourage them all to send the same rote letter, MPs will just assume you have a nasty little man with a photocopier blasting them out from your office, and ignore you even more than they did before.
We consider the use of form letters to be an abuse of our service. Not only does it have the problems outlined above, but the effectiveness of our service depends on MPs' willingness to read messages sent from us - we are not an officially sanctioned communication method. If they consider us a source of pointless spam, then legitimate messages will be ignored too.
As a result, when we're made aware of form letters going through our system, we add code to block them.
Thus, I find it quite mystifying when I see party politicians espousing the benefits of boilerplate activism. Either they haven't thought about what'll happen when they start being spammed by supposedly-legitimate communications from their constituents, or they're ignoring their constituents anyway.
-- Yoz
If I care about an issue enough to click a link in an email sent to me by a group I belong to, I care about the issue. Or at least I think the people running the group I belong to care about the same issues that I do, so I'm willing to say I care about their issues. Regardless of whether I read the letter "I'm sending".
On the other hand, if I sit down and write out a letter in cursive or block letters by hand, put it in an envelope and pay $0.37 to mail it to the editor it's likely the issue is something I really do care about.
Sure, I _might_ care about the two different issues just as much. But how much I care sure shows more in the later case.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Boutin's Slate article has the dirt and is funny to boot.
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
they range all over the place from small outfits to the monstrous.
So this thing of carbon copy letters is really the mark of an political script kiddy. A pro would be able to get unique mail written every time.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Your MPs must be smarter than our congressmen.
Clearly, if I were to copy a work of yours and sign my name to it without giving you credit, I would be guilty of plagiarism. Even if I had your permission (or blessing, as is the case here), it would be plagiarism. Plagiarism at work can get you reprimanded or even fired. Plagiarism in school can get you a failing grade or an expulsion. It is a big deal to writers, and I am not surprised to see the newspaper editors work so hard to avoid publishing such works. I am surprised that this word did not make it into the the New York Times article. Spineless.
As the head of a non-profit group based in NY (can't say which, legal reasons), it is tremendously easy to provide a boilerplate to people concerned about issues rather than make them write an individual letter.
/. thread: see here.
As a volunteer for a non-profit site in the UK that does its best to encourage democracy, I can say that form (boilerplate) letters are a major threat to the effectiveness of our service and thus we block them whenever possible.
I have ranted elsewhere about this in this
The time and money resources that editors and politicians devote to reading communications is finite. I beg you to think about the individually-crafted letters written by authors without your publicity machines (organisational or mechanical) that you are blocking with your spam.
-- Yoz
A boilerplate letter as a comment to an article about boilerplate letters. This is not offtopic. Redundant perhaps, but offtopic!?
In the summer and fall of 2000, I worked in the press office of a high profile congressional race (Washington's 1st Congressional District, where Microsoft resides, in fact). Part of my job included trying to get as many letters in support of my candidate published in the dozen area papers as possible. I was quite successful in getting letters published without ever having to form letters. Here's how:
From among all of our campaign volunteers, I gathered a group of people specially interested in helping out with our media efforts. I had a core media volunteer list of about 75 people. Every week, I would send an email to these people with talking points for these letters and addresses for the papers I hoped them to send their letter to. Every time, without fail, that I sent out these talking points four or five letters would be published within a week. I think the reason I had such success was because I can't write letters as well as the collective efforts of 75 people. If the issue is education, a volunteer teacher will always write a better and more viable letter than me. If the issue is Social Security, a retiree will have a more impassioned response than any 20 year old could ever hope.
So in the end, I think form letters are a way of cheating. They discourage people from calling upon their own experiences in writing letters and getting involved in issues. With a carefully selected pool of volunteers, it's not very difficult to get letters published.
sig my booty, check my website
Dear Dr. Fuck,
Clippy, the charming personal Microsoft Office assistant, told me I should kill Steve Jobs and then eat both my own legs. But all I want to do is type a letter. Should I follow its instructions?
Sincerely,
Generic Cubicle Slave
Akron, OH
I can't believe you are even trying to defend this. A number of identical or near-identical letters will do absolutely nothing to influence someone aware of the duplicates. In fact, my guess is that it will aggravate him, perhaps even to the point of having a negative impact. It might work for someone who is not aware that this is possible, but I wouldn't count on it.
And if some idiot is actually stupid enough to knowingly pay attention to this crap, then they will get what will be coming to them.
I have never and will never send someone else's words with my name on them. Doing this is completely unethical and I can't believe it when groups actually suggest this. It is not enough that the other side is doing it. This is stooping way too low for my tastes.
If you don't feel strongly enough about a topic to write a quick note about it, then your opinion does not count and does not matter. Encouraging people to send out a prewritten letter in support of your propaganda is just plain wrong. I am glad the editors have gotten together to weed this stuff out.
Give a particular topic of letter, this problem isn't too different than looking for spam vs. ham, and can be approached in similar ways (e.g. Bayesian filter).
Actually, you probably could do quite well identifying boilerplate by simply dropping all punctuations, spaces, and capitalized words, and then computing a hash (say, md5) over every even letter and over every odd letter. If either hash matches either hash of another letter, that should
be a very specific indication of boilerplating.
These still require a corpus of letters, though, or a way to generate one from a search.
Once the Office of Information Awareness gets its fingers into that, they'll be able to tell us which letters are boilerplate.
I'm getting real tired of journalists campaigning for a political party or agenda, it's sad, destructive, and stupid.
The liberials have used Boilerplate Activism for years and years, so much so that I think picking on the Republicans approaches ludicrous as many in the hype field would know.
The widespread use of a boilerplate speaks volumes as to how generally accepted it's containined opinion is. The more concerned citizens using the same boilerplate, the more that this-or-that issue means to the community at large (or better yet, your reader base).
b/c they don't understand what they have sent on. They have believed that it represent the ideals they think the source of the letter represents.
Pardon me but the RNC and DNC can get their letters in papers as Editorials and Actual Stories!!! The leter pages are for citizens personal concerns, even if they overlapp the concerns of the RNC or DNC, only the person theirself can express that opinion accurately.
Razor / pyzor etc.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Ok, this is terrible and we all need to remember we don't want to be conformists so it's time for the non-conformist oath. Please say aloud:
. I am an individual
. I have my own ideas
. I with think what I want to think
. I well express myself freely
. I will not repeat things other people say.
Repeat five times. Thank you. (stolen and paraphrased...)
-pyrrho
As more political campaign material moves online, it might be interesting to apply a similar process and analyze candidates' speeches and promotional materials with an eye to uncovering how much stump speech is original. A lot of candidates make only modest efforts to repackage what is, in effect, a centrally distributed message: the party line. This is less crude than the cut-and-paste activism decried in the article, but it bears comparison. Since pattern recognition techniques can smack down commercial robots, why not sic them on the political automatons as well?
If people can't get off their fscking duffs and write to their congressmen, then they get whatever they deserve.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Because it's a newspaper. Send all the boilerplate you want to your senator, or the President, or a company. They care. But a reader of a letters page doesn't want to know what Planned Parenthood or the RNC think, if they did they'd just go read the articles about those organizations.
Dear /.,
Why should a sentiment be trivialized just because the sender decided to use a statement that was prepared by another? Many people are either not verbally eloquent or lack the confidence to write in their own words. If a person agrees with what they send, shouldn't that be the determinant? We sign contracts we didn't write all the time. How is this any different?
Signed, Anonymous Coward
PS. This is why. It's lame. I want to hear the words of the person sending the letter - I can then determine if they actually know what they are taliking about, if they have a personal stake in the issue, if they have even done any research - or if they are another monkey banging on a Brother Word Processor. If you can't take the time to form your own words about something you believe in enough to send a letter/email about, how can I be sure that the issue and the reasons and situations behind it are fixed in your mind?
Why doesn't the NYT hook up with the same people who are checking term papers and thesis papers for cheating - IIRC, they had a database of every paper that anyone ever turned in - it then checked new papers against the DB to see if there were matching word patterns or entire paragraphs lifted. The link escapes me, but it was posted here last year sometime...
P.S. I agree with you but I don't feel like writing a whole letter.
-Your buddy AC
SINCERELY,
John Smith
johnsmith@microsoft.com
P.S. PLEASE NOTE THAT I, John Smith, HAVE NO RELTIONSHIP WITH THE MICROSOFT CORPORATION, CREATORS OF WINDOWS(R), MS OFFICE(R), INTERNET EXPLORER(R), AND OTHER FINE SOFTWARE PRODUCTS.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I must admit, sometimes I felt like there wasn't enough background provided and I wanted (and sometimes obtained) more information about the subject I wrote about, but this is a world away from just creating form letters with zero thought.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
"Informative astroturf": Group A's form sends 500 emails to a Congressional committee. This is like sending a petition with 500 signatures. It is not meant to trick the committee in any way--just to show the level of suppport.
"Deceptive Astroturf": Group B's form sends 500 signed emails to 500 different local papers as "Letters to the Editor." This is meant to trick the paper into giving free space instead of paying for ad space. It is meant to trick readers into thinking somebody from a local town wrote the letter--that's what propagandists call the "Plain Folks" trick.
Nobody is saying that the Republicans are the first group, or the only group, to try deceptive astroturf. But I think big, well-funded groups should be held to a higher standard than this. If nothing else, they could afford to pay those little papers for the space to air their views.
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
So far i'm aware of one american site that appears to be similar in concept to yours. It's called Capitol Advantage.However I do not think they are as pre-occupied about ethical issues as your organization is, as they appear to make it easy for organizations such as "The Direct Marketer's Association" to set-up accounts with their site and offer users a form letter (capwiz is a service of Capitol Advantage) which they can submit "as-is" or choose to amend. If of course elected to do the latter, and ended-up writing an entirely different letter which offered consistent counterpoints to the original DMA arguments.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
just look around.
Godles payper liesense stock markup touts & shills at everIE pourtoll.
tell 'em robbIE.
va.msn.?net?(VAST)
Remember a company called Digital Integrity? they folded a few years ago for lack of funding due to the dot-com bailout in 2000. they had a good, legitimate product and an excellent crew to make it work. they made a search engine that searched and compared whole blocks of text, originally written by a professor at Berkeley to look for plaigerism in students termpapers. The software ran on unix and linux and was written in C++. I wonder what happened to the software? Sounds like it would be a good application for this sort of thing. The Boilerplate letters I get in my spam folder every day are pathetically written, and rarely actually reflect the opinions of the illiterate morons that use them.
Stupid Humans.....
I would prefer to ban any links to any content if it requires any sort of password.
/. already has in place?
You mean like the policy that
Someone has to be the 1st to print the letter.
Then a few more have to print it so one can see the trend.
I'm pretty sure that a repository of letters to the editor is already being kept for your protection.
The problem is that they will think about all the individually crafted letters and realize how great it is that the politicians can't get a letter from a perspective other than their own. Crapflooding is good for keeping silent or unnoticed an opinion. Crap.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Known idiot and unoriginal wanna-be troll trying to get karma! Is really a 14 year old kid from Buffalo, NY. Frequents trolltalk. see for yourself.
TurnItIn.com. I don't think it works very well, because, IIRC, it doesn't check paper sources, just online sources. That would work pretty well in this application though.
fsck -u
So, off which exactly topic was my comment? I cannot understand as I cannot legally read any topic!
Less is more !
The folks at http://www.plagiarism.org/ claim to have good tools for detecting plagairism in an academic setting. How is different copying someone else's letter different from copying someone else's assignment?
I would bet that this would at least help...
Ah, but no matter how personal a letter you send to your Congresscritter, you get a form letter back if you get anything. Give them deep, well-thought out ideas and they return something that sounds an awful lot like a campaign speech.
As they are not likely to do anything other than say "This one is for", "This one against" doesn't it make sense to make it as easy as possible to get as many letters to them in support of your group's position?
Not that this really matters. If organization's want to really influence Congressmembers, they need to make it as easy to donate a few bucks to a Congresscritter's name in support of some issue/organization as possible. Webcomics with tiny readerships (relative to the number of people concerned about various political issues) seem to rake in the dough with paypal accounts. What if all the e-mail boilerplate letter pages had donation buttons on them too? "Dear Senator, this donation to your re-election campaign comes from the XYZ group. We sure like you. We hope you like us." *nudge* *nudge*
Yes, I'm advocating bribery. It's not like that isn't how it already works. (Bitter? Me? Nah.)
how is this offtopic??? It was a big help in my reading of the article. How would I be able to read it without registering.
Do you mean you actually have to think about this? Isn't it blindingly obvious? Professional politicians rarely view themselves as the public servants we meant them to be.
In the UK political world we don't have so much graft, bribery and corruption as the US does, the UK parliament actually has strict rules against it, and a standing committee whose job it is to root it out wherever it may be hiding. Instead we just have politicians who ignore the public because their agenda is focussed elsewhere on what they think of as some "bigger picture", which they think the general public isn't qualified to understand. i.e. There is a widespread tendency for experienced UK politicians to adopt a arrogant and patrician attitude (public opinion doesn't matter, we who rule know better than them, if they disagree with us it's only because they're stupid). As witness Bush & Blair's incomprehensible warmongering, against the wishes of a majority of both their electorates.
The friend of the professional politician abd the greatest enemy of democracy must surely be the party political system, for allowing and even encouraging such abuses.
But did you know that neither the UK nor the US is actually a democracy? The US is a republic, which is different, and the UK is a parliamentary democracy, which is also different.
We're never going to get power devolved to the individual until we manage to expel these witless shysters and install for ourselves some properly democratic government. Though that's difficult to achieve when the party who promises to deliver the necessary electoral reforms instantly drops the idea the minute they gain power. As Blair's Labour did when they got in.
Just wanted to share that with you :o\
[clip] It further enabled (what I consider) abuse; and it enabled the ability...
I learned about this scam (bolier plate editorials) via Salon. Google had nothing to do with it (I don't use Google). I validated all the links via other search engines. The internet (as an 'it') may have been helpful in uncovering the slime involved, but google has no special claim to fame in why the story surfaced. That's like giving Goodyear credit for your being able to travel to Grandma's for Christmas, when the highway that connects the two of you is more likely the main reason. Too many people have google on the brain.
There is more than one way up or down a mountain.
I understand (and sympathise with) your points, but I think you're possibly being overly cynical in places:
There is a widespread tendency for experienced UK politicians to adopt a arrogant and patrician attitude (public opinion doesn't matter, we who rule know better than them, if they disagree with us it's only because they're stupid). As witness Bush & Blair's incomprehensible warmongering, against the wishes of a majority of both their electorates.
I agree that there's definitely a tendency to patronise the public. Right now STAND, FaxYourMP's single-issue sister site (say that one three times fast) is fighting the government's efforts to sneak an ID card scheme past us by masking it in anti-terror, anti-asylum rhetoric. However, it isn't working. As with STAND's previous campaign against RIPA extensions, it looks very much like the public outcry is going to force the government into a U-turn.
Our experience with MPs is that, despite a desperate lack of resources, many of them pay close attention to the messages from their constituents and reflect these opinions to government. Many users of STAND have had messages of agreement back from their MPs, whether Tory or Labour, and those MPs are going on to raise questions in the House.
Democratically-elected governments ignore public opinion at their peril. Apart from the current war fiasco, New Labour has been pandering to majority right-wing attitudes rather than sticking to their socialist origins. But don't forget that it's Blair and not Bush who lacks public support for the war.
The friend of the professional politician abd the greatest enemy of democracy must surely be the party political system, for allowing and even encouraging such abuses.
I don't think this is anything to do with party politics. In fact, Blair's current position is ignoring his party almost completely, which is why they're so close to revolt.
But did you know that neither the UK nor the US is actually a democracy? The US is a republic, which is different, and the UK is a parliamentary democracy, which is also different. We're never going to get power devolved to the individual until we manage to expel these witless shysters and install for ourselves some properly democratic government.
I have to confess ignorance over the difference between a republic and a "proper" democracy. However, a word of warning to those crying out for proportional representation: take a look at Israel. It's a rare Israeli government that isn't hurriedly formed, post-election, out of a coalition of big and small parties across the political spectrum which ends up a completely immobile, noisy mess as a result.
-- Yoz
The Windows operating system is a very secure operating system. The security inherent to it is based on the secure design principles applied during the principle design phase and the secure coding practises practised by the coders securing it.
@ hotmail.com
Although some irresponsible system administrators have irresponsibly administrated systems under their administration by setting poor default passwords (such as blank passwords) and by enabling additional services that are enabled by default and may not be secure, the Windows operating system is a very secure operating system.
A few loud and uninformed individuals have individually attacked the security of the very secure Windows operating system in an uninformed and loud way. These loud and uniformed individuals should tape their mouths shut and attend school in order to prevent their loudness and uninformedness from spreading.
Sincerely,
sincere_bill_gates_worshipper_29346
*Coming from a Liberal*
1. These astroturf campaigns are somewhat new, but the tactics are rather old. Meaning that one of the ideas that is making the GOP so successful is their use of talking points and catch phrases. Note the widespread description of Bush's tax plan as "bold", one of these letters stating that he is showing "genuine leadership", and accusing the Democrats of "obstruction". They have been doing this since Newt stormed into power, his PAC called GOPAC initiating htis campaign.
2. As far as I know the Dems have not ever done this. They are nowhere as near organized as the GOP are...(if you ask me they are just politically innocent/naive). Never getting a catch phrase or anything like that in.
3. This story, if it is worth it's worth (I can't access nytimes right now:p), will be sure to mention that this is only newspaper editors that are looking to scan for astroturf, NOT congressmen. Such form letters to congressmen are akin to a petition, where to letters to the editor are more for personal opinion. That is a huge difference.
The only thing you really need to do is get a large enough body of media submitting their frequently-boilerplated topics and check if they've been spotted before. You'd want to have a way to retrieve the other submissions so you could do an eyeball test, something not available in Razor right now, but the code could be extended to do this.
Anything like this for Euro-MPs? They have a larger constituency and are therefore even more remote.
How do you know that these people actually understand the issue that you're campaigning about, and that they're not just sheep being led on by manipulist tactics? At least as importantly, how does the person receiving the letters know?
This is the central reason that I never sign petitions or send form letters, and also the reason why I don't give much credit to them. I'm constantly amazed at how many people will sign anything put in front of them at a moment's notice, based on a few seconds of thought based solely on information provided by the person asking them to sign it. There's no way to verify that people sending the letters actually understand the issue, or have taken any time to put any thought in.
If I feel strongly about something then I do write a letter or take action on my own initiative. I've written three or four in the past year. I'm also not afraid to admit that I'm not fully informed on some issues. If I think they're worth my time however, I'll get reasonably informed before I start acting on them.
If form letters and petitions were officially filed in the trash can and openly ignored, it might be easier for people reading correspondence to find the more carefully thought through responses.
Why should a sentiment be trivialized just because the sender decided to use a statement that was prepared by another? Many people are either not verbally eloquent or lack the confidence to write in their own words. If a person agrees with what they send, shouldn't that be the determinant? We sign contracts we didn't write all the time. How is this any different?
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
Either way the real difficulty is to discern real opinions from rented ones and real citizens from astroturfers.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Call this a silly question, but isnt a form letter sent by hundreds just a badly organised petition?! There are plenty of petitions in the form of "Dear x I believe that ... Signed," followed by 100s of signatures. In this case rather than getting the signatures together, they just organise a rainforest to be delivered to a politician in pieces.
--Zuzzy
Just because I choose to use a boilerplate letter does not make my opinion any different. Just better written.
$G
-- $G
However, a word of warning to those crying out for proportional representation: take a look at Israel. It's a rare Israeli government that isn't hurriedly formed, post-election, out of a coalition of big and small parties across the political spectrum which ends up a completely immobile, noisy mess as a result.
Personally considering the mess they make of virtually everything, I wouldn't mind having a immobile, noisy mess of a government.
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
For a good laugh, try googling the 'man on the street' newspapers use to represent the 'common man.'
They seldom are disinterested parties, and their political/philosophical leanings are NEVER detailed.
If the newspapers use google for letter to the editor, why can't they do a little research on their interview subjects?
If it can filter spam, it can find boilerplates.
I've used the faxyourmp service, and must admit that I did eventually get a response (some 6 weeks later, when the New Labour Politburo had finished writing the form letter for MPs to sign).
I've just had the second form letter, telling me what a bad lad Saddam is and why I should care, but since it's obviously Labour Central Office trying to boilerplate me, I never read it all ;)
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
This (planting letters to the editor) is just one of the sleazy tactics which PR firms use to promote the products of their corporate masters. Other tactics include everything from producing bogus "Video News Releases" (which are often picked up by local TV and radio stations and broadcast as "news"), to infiltration and subversion of activist groups. For more on how the PR industry works, the book Toxic Sludge is Good for You! is a must read. Also check out PRWatch.org.
I yearn for the good old days when a NYT piece would coin a new derogatory adjective for a republican which would be repeated parrot-like by all of the national media.
No that's 'gravitas'