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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.
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!
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.
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)
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
Oh the irony of posting that to slashdot!
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...
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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"
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
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
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.
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/
"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...
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'm pretty sure that a repository of letters to the editor is already being kept for your protection.