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Millions of the comments posted during public debates like the FCC's net neutrality repeal process have been faked by political operatives using false identities
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- Title
- Political Operatives Are Faking Voter Outrage With Millions Of Made-Up Comments To Benefit The Rich And Powerful
- Word count
- 4461 words
I remember this like it was yesterday. The use of simplistic techniques for generating paraphrases in fake comments on the FCC electronic comment filing system (ECFS) was so blatant. This article stood out to me at the time for showing how blatant it was. As someone in the field of NLP, I can say with certainty that there are way more sophisticated natural language generation (NLG) techniques than what were used at the time (and many were available then, much more now). The significant issue here is that FCC had, admittedly, no way to confirm the identity of anyone who signed up and commented on the ECFS. It’s fine if they didn’t have the resources to implement a system to do that, but at the same time, they should not be making policy decisions based on such information, which was so clearly manipulated.
I think the most surprising part of this is that it wasn't directly done by the FCC, which is what I was assuming was happening because of how shady they were in regards to the investigation.
The FCC admitted that they couldn’t verify the identity of the accounts on the ECFS, and accepted the submissions and used them to prop up their decisions anyway. Which is worse? Faking the comments themselves, making the entire system a sham, or knowingly keeping the system open for submissions in order to allow the fakes to drown out the concerns raised by real submissions, maintaining the plausibility that the process was legitimate? I’d argue this is the same as sham democracies running fake elections where everyone knows the ballot boxes are stuffed, but the pageantry is foisted on the public anyway in order to maintain a veil of legitimacy.
Yes, but at the same time we already knew from the beginning that these requests for comments were already pageantry. There's a reason why it's not called a vote. If there was no fraudulent comments - no, even if all the fraudulent comments were for net neutrality - I doubt it would have stopped the stooges on the board at the FCC from doing what they wanted to do.
My analogy wasn’t intended to compare the FCC’s public comments to a vote, but to point out the similarity to systems where there is the pretense of public input through some channel, when in reality, that channel is "write only" and will never really be considered. What I question is allowing the system to be open under the guise that they would be considering public comments. If they were just going to ignore public comments anyway, why bother to put up a system with known flaws? Surely it would make more sense to just shut down the docket item about net neutrality and do whatever they were going to do anyway, regardless of public opinion? I think it’s more nefarious to maintain the guise of taking public interest into account than to simply ignore public interest outright and be honest about it.
You will not find me disagreeing about the nefariousness of Pai's FCC. But public comment in a more sane environment makes sense. Pai was right about one thing during this debacle; the most important thing about the comments process is not the loudness of the crowds, but the strength of the arguments made. Dealing with radio waves is pretty complicated and the FCC board is mostly political in nature, so public comments are vitally important to find out potential problem with changes they may be making.