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More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked

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Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked

#71

What needs to happen for shit like this not to happen anymore.

It is, quite obviously, absolutely clear that net neutrality is better in any way imaginable. Except for a small handful of companies that happen to be well-connected to the current administrations. Ending it serves nobody but them, not even "big business" if Google, FB (and the next Google&FB) are included in it.

There are two possible interpretations why it's happening: The benevolent perspective is that the political right has enshrined the "free market" as not just a heuristic that has served us well, but as an ultimate goal of politics itself.

The less benevolent interpretation is that it is precisely the opposition from consumers and everyone with expertise that makes ending net neutrality so valuable.

Almost any connection of reality, and the power of reasoned arguments, has disappeared from US politics. As seen with the efforts to repeal ACA, there are maybe three or four Republican Senators left who can be influenced with either appeals to reason, humanity, or who simply have a constituency that forces them to do so.

You cannot change this dynamic with arguments. You need to heal the culture wars. Somehow.

Case in point: a judge, who was twice removed from the bench because he fundamentally disregarded the most basic tenets of the rule of law, such as the Supreme Court having the power to overrule other courts, was the prohibitive favourite in his Senate race. He may still win, even though it is proven almost beyond any doubt that used creep on underage girls[0].

I wish I could give similar examples for the other party. But it'd just be an excursive in false balance. However, I wouldn't rule out such behaviour by voters from the other side. It's only that until now, that party and its candidates would not have had the chuzpe to just cry "fake news" and stay in the race.

Anyway: people have become attached to their party as they do to a sports team. They self-sort into states with like-minded people. The culture wars creep into anything, so that even the sports you play or the restaurants you visit will be politically homogenous.

It is quite obvious from above what my "team" is–and I'm not even a US citizen. What I try (and failed spectacularly in this post), is to apply a certain level of intellectual rigour even to "my team's" arguments. I also go out of my way to show appreciation for any acts of reasonable behaviour by people on the political right.

Two examples that come to mind: I had tears in my eyes, and frequently mentioned, John McCain's graceful correction of a citizen at a town hall who called Obama a "muslim terrorist". I have also defended the current President's airstrike against the Syrian government after their latest use of chemical weapons.

[0]: the proof here being his own admission that he first thought his later wife was hot when he saw her perform in a school dance. She was 15 at the time, and he was 30-something.

Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked

#72
post #60

FCC has explicitly said that they have ignored any opinion comments. They have only considered comments which bring new facts or a legal opinion. So the fact that many comments were faked is irrelevant anyway.

Which would hopefully bite them in the ass if I had any faith in a Trump-appointed judicial branch. The FCC is required to take public comments into account when making regulations, this should be a fairly straightforward lawsuit.

The FCC is required to take the ideas and issues from public comments into account. When multiple comments raise the same issues or issues that were already considered in the initial policy recommendations, the FCC can ignore these comments without issue.

Separating the comment policy from the net neutrality issue - the comment policy actually makes sense. Ideally, government officials should be acting as technocrats - considering all the arguments and choosing the best policy. A vocal minority pushing an argument that is bad should not be able to prevent or indefinitely delay sensible regulation.

While this line of reasoning is frustrating for net neutrality advocates, it's easy to see why this is sensible w.r.t say vaccines. Regardless of how many anti-vaccination comments are sent, I want officials writing regulations that reflect the best solution w.r.t the scientific facts and the ethical concerns (both around government compulsion and the ability of a parent to hurt their child through neglect), not the solution that reflects the majority opinion of the small subset of people who submitted comments.

Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked

#73
post #34

I don’t believe that botnet activity has been limited to one side, based on how reddit has looked this last week. Example of suspicious postings: https://www.reddit.com/r/Frisson/comments/7engpr/image_reddi...

How are those suspicious? It's an issue redditors care a lot about. A lot of those posts were done by moderators in their respective communities and don't appear to be copied and pasted content. It looks from the screengrab like you upvoted them too...

Not my screengrab.

That is a post in frisson where someone is posting a pic that supposedly will generate frisson. There is clearly a campaign to post subreddit themed references to the topic.

The vote counts seem aberrant to me as well.

Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked

#74
post #42

There was also a lot of direct copypaste spam on the pro-NN side https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Sc4-R2waeRrGnNL90...

I’m sure a lot of the pro duplicates are from websites that help the person post a comment, but they just use the form comment instead of adding their own stuff.

Wouldn't this logic apply to the anti nn side as well?

Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked

#75
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was evidence that some of the leaked emails were subtly altered to make them look worse [1]. Additionally every campaign, company, even private individual has emails that wouldn't look good if they were leaked to the public with no context. I'd bet there were emails from the other side that would have been just as damaging had they been leaked. In fact we know there were, because several damaging emails from Do…

> There was evidence that some of the leaked emails were subtly altered to make them look worse This is a lie. The emails were cryptographically signed, they have not been altered.

Let's not pretend cryptographic signing of emails makes them immune to tampering. This makes it essentially a guarantee that they were not modified between Point A and Point B but that's about it.

I'm not saying they were or weren't modified nor am I saying it's even a good theory they were modified but we shouldn't make cryptographic signing sound more capable than it is.

Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked

#76
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Just like the election This seems far worse than what happened with the election. The hacked emails at issue in the election were real, and they revealed bad things that the Clinton campaign was involved in. I have always found it laughable that the complaint seems to be “we lost because the Russians uncovered the bad things I was doing, and it’s not fair that people found out about them”. If the emails had all been…

Given that the FCC resisted efforts to investigate, I wouldn’t be surprised if the FCC was complit in the fake messages (so they could claim they were in line with public opinion)

After working as a government contracting for many years I'd lean more towards gross incompetency than anything complicit. All the people in charge of critical tech in the DoD that I dealt with here placed their through nepotism and had no clue what they were doing.

Granted I'm not saying anything of this is good I just think it's far more likely that they're all idiots over there.

Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked

#77
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not all of the emails were cryptographically signed.

But the majority, including many of the most damaging ones, were signed.

>The majority...many

Notice I never said all or even most of the emails were altered.

That some of them may have been subtly altered was one point of my argument.

Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked

#78
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was evidence that some of the leaked emails were subtly altered to make them look worse [1]. Additionally every campaign, company, even private individual has emails that wouldn't look good if they were leaked to the public with no context. I'd bet there were emails from the other side that would have been just as damaging had they been leaked. In fact we know there were, because several damaging emails from Do…

The Clinton campaign refused to ever point to a specific email that was altered, making the claim that they were quite unbelievable.

Let's assume that there is an email that looks bad for the campaign.

The email was slightly altered to make it look a bit worse.

Do they admit to writing the slightly less awful email, prolonging the coverage and erasing all doubt that they wrote it?

Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked

#79
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Just like the election This seems far worse than what happened with the election. The hacked emails at issue in the election were real, and they revealed bad things that the Clinton campaign was involved in. I have always found it laughable that the complaint seems to be “we lost because the Russians uncovered the bad things I was doing, and it’s not fair that people found out about them”. If the emails had all been…

There was evidence that some of the leaked emails were subtly altered to make them look worse [1]. Additionally every campaign, company, even private individual has emails that wouldn't look good if they were leaked to the public with no context. I'd bet there were emails from the other side that would have been just as damaging had they been leaked. In fact we know there were, because several damaging emails from Do…

@learc83 'Innocuous party planning emails morphed into Pizza Gate, which was spread in large part by Russian trolls.'

Don't want to hijack an important discussion of deliberate misrepresentation of net neutrality citizen perspectives, but I think you will find there was a massive emergency cover up over 'pizzagate'. The sudden use of the term 'fake news' everywhere in the corporate media coincided with the pizzagate revelations as i noted here previously.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

There is very disturbing evidence of nefarious activities that should have been formally investigated in my opinion. Ben Swann, whose career was quickly destroyed over pizzagate, discussed the tip of the iceberg here. https://youtu.be/-GZFHLAcG8A

Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked

#80
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was evidence that some of the leaked emails were subtly altered to make them look worse [1]. Additionally every campaign, company, even private individual has emails that wouldn't look good if they were leaked to the public with no context. I'd bet there were emails from the other side that would have been just as damaging had they been leaked. In fact we know there were, because several damaging emails from Do…

@learc83 'Innocuous party planning emails morphed into Pizza Gate, which was spread in large part by Russian trolls.' Don't want to hijack an important discussion of deliberate misrepresentation of net neutrality citizen perspectives, but I think you will find there was a massive emergency cover up over 'pizzagate'. The sudden use of the term 'fake news' everywhere in the corporate media coincided with the pizzagate…

Pizzagate is a crackpot conspiracy theory. A rather bad crackpot conspiracy theory.

No one takes it seriously. Even Alex Jones has retracted his Pizzagate statements.

The term fake news started being used because people were spreading fake news based on completely absurd readings of leaked emails.

The "evidence" for Pizzagate is absolutely comical.

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