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."

Comments

Silly

[unterderbrucke]

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.

Re:Silly

[MrEd]

Contrariwise, when I was volunteering for the Kingston Green Party (Ontario (Canada)) doing public awareness work about herbicide/pesticide issues the local paper recieved numerous pro-chemicals letters from 'concerned citizens'.

Upon closer inspection we discovered that they were industry astroturfers mailing in from out of town. They were writing pro-pesticide letters to any local paper that was covering the issues.

This leads me to believe that this type of misrepresentation goes on all the time. I would be in favor of any technology that would either allow editors to check on the legitimacy of letters or, if they were not so inclined, at least aid after-the-press detective work.

How about using it against journalists?

[Donut]

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

Automatic Googling for derivative works

[capedgirardeau]

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

Boilerplate Activism and its threat to democracy

[yoz]

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

I used to do this for a living

[Petrox]

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.