How A Lobbying Firm May Have Submitted Fake FCC Comments (gizmodo.com)

Remember when dozens of Americans said their names were used for fake comments sent to America's FCC opposing net neutrality?

Now Gizmodo's taken a hard look at their past interviews with Dan Germain, the CTO of a company that helps lobbyists construct digital "grassroots" campaigns -- and at the conservative nonprofit Center for Individual Freedom (CFIF). Attempting to confirm or disprove the alleged link between CQ and CFIF, Gizmodo initiated its own review of the API data logs last week, focusing on comments from dozens of people who claim they were impersonated online.... [T]imestamps contained in the API logs reveal an unmistakable correlation between the use of CQ's API key and numerous identical comments containing CFIF's text... By comparing the API logs to comment data that the FCC had already made publicly available, Gizmodo found more than a dozen comments containing CFIF's boilerplate language... In each successful case, the comments were received by the FCC while CQ's API key was in use, with the logs reflecting deviations in the timestamps roughly equivalent to the blink of an eye...

Prior to CQ becoming a subject of interest in an ongoing criminal investigation, Germain explained at length that his company had created a platform specifically to direct comments to the FCC and that it had been operational since at least 2016.... Whereas many of the groups responsible for uploading millions of comments requested only one or two API keys, logs show that CQ, over a period of several months, requested no fewer than 114.
The article notes that identical comments using language from CFIF "are now suspected of having been uploaded using CQ's software" -- and that they were submitted to the FCC "several hundred thousand times."

Comments

Oh goody, a Net Neutrality thread

[rsilvergun]

I can trot out my usual question: is this gonna change how anyone votes? Seriously, is it? /. is an older audience, so statistically there's some folks who got behind the current administration who's both responsible for these policies and actively looking the other way. And /. is a fairly well educated bunch, so we also know that our voting choices got us here.

So once again, is this gonna change how anyone vote? I haven't gotten a single "Yeah" to day....

Re: Oh goody, a Net Neutrality thread

[Anonymous Coward]

So many scandals from this administration and still blin support from Fox news and Republicans during the Cohen hearings. Don't think this one will change a trump loyalist mind

Probably not, but is that a bad thing?

[Picodon]

I can trot out my usual question: is this gonna change how anyone votes? Seriously, is it?

It depends what you mean by “changing how people vote”. If you meant “abruptly switching to the other side”, then the answer is likely negative. After all, suppose that you’d just read the opposite news: some questionable company helped manipulate things, hoping to make your side win. Would you automatically change your vote in favour of the opposite side? I wouldn’t.

Sure, such affair would leave a foul taste in my mouth and I’d want things to improve. Yes, if my elected officials were directly implicated, I’d certainly consider possible (and sensible) alternatives with the same general alignment (but alternatives are often scarce or inexistent), while retaining some amount of pragmatism. Setting aside the mindset of radical one-issue voters, there are many concerns to simultaneously consider, and compromises to be made, when casting a vote. So, I don’t find it shocking that the answer to your question is, in all likelihood, “no”.

That being said, as long as it is covered in the media and talked about, this kind of abuse can have some small but lasting and compounding impact. Of course, one can dream that citizens would forcefully communicate their disapprobation to their elected representative, in an attempt to stimulate positive change (such as passing laws instituting penalties for such corrupt practice, and ensuring that those laws are properly enforced). But even in a fairly passive society, after abuses have occurred repeatedly, popular indignation will indeed begin to influence poll results.

Unfortunately, mounting exasperation can lead to people haphazardly jumping from one extreme to another (or even abandoning moderation to embrace an extreme), and that has rarely been a good thing. As recent (and no-so-recent) history has all too well illustrated in a number of countries, years of unbridled corruption can drive despairing people to enthusiastically vote for the worst demagogic scumbag who’s promised to “clean house” by any means.

In short, I prefer to hope that this type of news does not directly change the way people vote, but that it helps shape people’s perception and change the way people talk about political issues and about the process by which political decisions are made. And I do hope that we get laws and enforcement that puts perpetrators of such stunt (as well as their complicit beneficiaries) behind bars for a dissuasive length of time.

Undermining Democracy

[bussdriver]

Attacking representative democracy's ability to function should be a treason class crime. Tampering with elections being obvious, but feedback systems for regulatory boards are also representatives and should also be included.