ESPN Latest To Nix User Comments, Abdicate Its Responsibility For Fostering A Good Community

from the comment-nowhere dept

Readers of this site will be aware of the trend over the past several years for news and media sites across the internet deciding to nix their respective comments sections. This wave of muzzles on the communities that previously participated in these sites has come with a variety of reasons or excuses, depending on your perspective. Some sites have noted that comments sections devolve into the worst humanity has to offer, with vile speech and spam-bots sucking up all of the digital oxygen. Other sites have suggested that some sort of liability comes along with any proper moderation of their comments sections. Still others have pointed towards social media platforms that can better take over the duties as some sort of 3rd party community gathering place, be it on Facebook or Twitter. All of these reasons are silly and false, or they simply abdicate the site's responsibility for fostering a well-functioning community of commenters. Here at Techdirt, we love our own community and value the ever-living hell out of our comments, be they supporters of our positions or well-meaning dissenters. Trolls come along for the ride, of course, but we trust our own community to act as a moderating force against them.

And, yet, the trend continues. The latest site to shutter its comment section is ESPN, to much unfortunate fanfare at Deadspin.

No longer will you be able to read an ESPN.com article and then underneath receive the dumbest possible reactions to it. The Worldwide Leader has phased out its Facebook-hybrid comment sections, as confirmed by a company spokesperson this week. None of the keyboard mashing will be archived—they will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Here's the official statement:

"Fans currently have more touchpoints than ever to voice their comments. We value their opinions, and feel that we are better able to serve them through our customer care team and our social platforms. In fact, we have and are continuing to create content for social that embraces these conversations and interacts with fans."

This is an abomination. Chintzy Instagram memes are no substitute for jokes that were plagiarized from somewhere else, or completely indecipherable opinions on Colin Kaepernick.

Readers at Deadspin will recognize this as classic Deadspin snark. The site's writers, despite having its own vibrant commenting community, have always taken a dim view of user contributions to the discussion. Somewhat amazingly, Deadspin in particular has a fairly good commenting community of its own, only deepening the mystery for the stance it takes here.

Well, perhaps not so mysterious. Simplistic might be the better word. Deadspin's objections, and likely ESPN's reasoning as well, is that ESPN comment sections tend to be the very kind of vile, idiotic contributions that we discussed in the intro. Deadspin, and likely ESPN, seem to stop the thought process right after making that determination and use it as its reason to muzzle the ESPN community entirely. What's lost in that kind of thinking is that the onus for fostering a good commenting community at ESPN is on... ESPN.

It's always been this way. There is so much benefit to be derived from a vibrant comments section, from increased reader engagement, to diverse thoughts that can shape discussion and the future work of the writers of posts, to a treasure trove of useful information and tips that journalists and commentators ought to be salivating over. The real story here is that ESPN has decided to toss all of those benefits out the window because it doesn't want to do any heavy-lifting to create a comments section that produces that kind of benefit.

It's the easy way out and no amount of snark or accurate portrayal of the current comments section as a cesspool will change that. Sites, if your comment section sucks, it's your fault. Taking your ball and going home, even if you're ESPN, is not the best option. It's not even a good option.

Filed Under: comments, social media
Companies: espn

Senators Ask FCC Why It Did Nothing To Stop Their Names From Being Fraudulently Used During Net Neutrality Repeal

from the fake-plastic-trees dept

Last year you'll recall that somebody abused the nonexistent privacy protections at the FCC website to flood the net neutrality repeal proceeding with millions of fake comments. While the vast majority of real people oppose the repeal, a bad actor was able to either fraudulently use the identities of real people (like myself), or hijack the identities of dead people to spam the proceeding with bogus support. The goal: undermine public trust in the public comment period in order to downplay the massive opposition to the FCC's handout to AT&T and Comcast.

Up to this point, the FCC has done less than nothing to investigate the fraud or prevent it from happening again, largely because it aided the FCC's agenda. In fact, the FCC went so far as to block a law enforcement investigation into who was behind the fraud.

Hoping to pull the scandal back onto a front burner, Senators Jeff Merkley and Pat Toomey this week sent a letter to the FCC stating that they've discovered that their names were also used to post fake comments during the repeal. The two demanded the FCC implement some kind of CAPTCHA system to help police automated bogus comments (a bot seems to have posted millions of bogus comments in alphabetical order), and asked what the agency was doing to prevent the problem from occurring again:

"Late last year, the identities of as many as two million Americans were stolen and used to file fake comments during the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC’s) comment period for the net neutrality rule,” the Senators wrote in a letter to Pai. “We were among those whose identities were misused to express viewpoints we do not hold. We are writing to express our concerns about these fake comments and the need to identify and address fraudulent behavior in the rulemaking process."

The FCC has been hammered for months over this scandal and has responded with the policy and regulatory equivalent of a shrug. I was told by the agency that there was nothing that could be done after my own identity was fraudulently used to support the repeal. So far, there's been absolutely no repercussions for the FCC or its staffers, though a GAO investigation is currently ongoing. It's worth noting that this kind of behavior isn't exclusive to the FCC, with other Trump regulatory actions also being hammered with bogus support via bot over the last year.

Filed Under: ajit pai, comments, fake names, fcc, jeff merkley, net neutrality, pat toomey, senate

The New York Times Tries Something Novel: Listening To And Interacting With Readers

from the treating-humans-like-humans dept

For years the whine-du-jour in online media circles has been about the poor old news comment section. Time and time again we've been told that in the modern era, the news comment section is an untamable and unredeemable beast: a troll-factory hellscape that is simply too hostile and dangerous to be manageable. So instead of trying to fix the problem, outlets have prevented users from commenting at all. Usually these announcements arrive with some disingenuous prattle about how the outlet in question really "values conversation" and was just trying to "build a stronger community" by muzzling on-site discourse.

The real reason killing the news comment section is so popular is less glamorous. Most websites simply are too lazy or cheap to try and explore solutions, since "quality discourse" isn't something site bean counters can clearly monetize. Many other editors simply don't like having an area where plebeians can so clearly and obviously outline errors made during reporting. Many of these editors believe we can and should return the bi-directional internet back to the "letter to the editor era," when publishers got to choose which member of the public was heard.

So while "who cares about on site community" becomes the trend, the New York Times is trying something particularly blasphemous in 2018: actually interacting with their readership. Several columnists have taken to the website's still-operating comment section as part of what columnist Frank Bruni says is part of a newfound effort at the paper to actually talk with readers from "time to time":

"I'm the column's author, hereby beginning a Times-encouraged experiment of joining the Comments thread from time to time. Thank you, PaulB67, and thank you, all, for reading us and for engaging in this conversation."

And:

"Hi. I'm the column's author; with The Times's encouragement, we writers on staff are beginning on occasion to join the Comments threads on the stories we publish."

Of course actually interacting with your readership is well out of line with fashion trends at the moment, and it's unclear how dramatic the Times' effort will be or if it will stick around. Most websites would rather outsource all public discourse to Facebook where it becomes SOP. But it runs in line with comments that former Times editor Liz Spayd began making a few years ago, namely that treating your audience like human beings instead of an irredeemable pile of jackasses might actually help foster better public discourse:

"Clearly, there is more to understanding readers than to literally have editors interact with them each day. Nonetheless, the small number of consumer-facing staffers is indicative of the bigger problem: a newsroom too distant from the people it serves...

What would prove more fruitful is for newsrooms to treat their audience like people with crucial information to convey — preferences, habits and shifting ways of consuming information. What do they like about what we do and how we do it? What do they want done differently? What do they turn to other sites for?"

That this is a novel idea tells you just far off trail we've wandered.

Spayd has since departed the Times to go work as a Facebook public image consultant, but apparently her lofty goal of actually giving a damn (TM) appears to have stuck around at the Times, for now. Again, actually interacting and caring about your audience is important, but recent evidence also suggests it doesn't really take much effort to craft tools that can have an immediate, positive impact on the quality of public discourse in comment sections. Yes, the news section is filled with a lot of bile and buffoonery, but the idea that this means all on-site news readers should be muzzled continues to be a popular, but flimsy, narrative.

Filed Under: comments, newspapers
Companies: new york times

It Took All Of Three Hours To Code A Plugin That Makes News Comments More Civil

from the irredeemable-trolls dept

For years now the narrative du jour in online news circles has been that the news comment section is an irredeemable menace. Outlet after outlet has informed us that they care so much about the integrity of public dialogue online that they've decided to ban website visitors from commenting on news articles entirely. Usually, these bans are accompanied by some sanctimonious claim that banning people from speaking on site was done because the outlet in question just really "valued conversation," or because they're just ultra-interested in building better relationships.

In reality, the motivation isn't quite so noble. Most websites just don't want to spend the time and money it takes to cultivate a healthy online community, in large part because bean counters can't monetize or measure the impact of quality discourse. Other outlets don't like having such a visible area where users can point out errors in news coverage. Most really would prefer we return back to the era of "letters to the editor" where the medium gets to dictate whose voices are deemed important, and whose are not. In that way it's often part power play, and part laziness.

Time and time again, these outlets have claimed that banning comments is the only option because cultivating on-site community is too expensive and time consuming. Again though, there's every indication that making the news comments section useful again doesn't take all that much work. In Norway, for example, a five-person team tookt all of three hours to code a WordPress plugin with a comically-simple premise:

"It was a basic idea," NRKbeta developer Ståle Grut told a South By Southwest crowd on Tuesday. "Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it."

The plugin doesn't take much work to install, and website operators simply have to build a simple multiple-choice Q&A based on the article to make it work. The coders work for NRKbeta, the tech-testing group at Norway's largest national media organization. And they were quick to point out that asking your on-site community for help (as opposed to, say, implying that their input is no longer relevant) often pays dividends:

"Use your audience," Grut told the crowd. "Talk to them; play with them. They'll like you better for it."

A WordPress plugin could force users to correctly answer a few multiple-choice questions before the page's comment field would appear. Once he got to the office, he and fellow staffers spent three hours building the plugin, which Grut reminded the crowd is wholly open source. "Naturally, this was paid for by Norwegian people, so you can thank them if you want to implement it," Grut said when emphasizing that he was happy if more sites tried it out."

And while the folks behind the plugin note that it's not a magic panacea for all news comment hostility, the fact that they were able to modestly tame news comment hostility with a bare modicum of effort suggests the "irredeemable" and widely maligned news comment section isn't quite the unfixable hellscape many lazy, cheap and threatened media outlets profess it to be.

Filed Under: civility, comments, community, interaction
Companies: nrkbeta

In Keeping And Improving News Comments, The Intercept Shows Websites What Giving A Damn Looks Like

from the this-muzzle-represents-my-love-for-you dept

For the last few years, the trend du jour in online media has been to demonize, vilify, then shutter the traditional news comment section. Usually these closures come with all manner of disingenuous nonsense about how websites are banning comments for the sake of "building relationships" or because the website in question just "really loves conversation." Usually, on-site users are then shoved toward social media silos at Twitter and Facebook we're told are "just as good" as an active, on-site community (read: doing this is cheaper and makes it somebody else's problem).

Traditionally, readers of these websites are told that news comments simply had to die because it's impossible to cultivate healthy discourse in the post-truth, mega-troll era. But as Techdirt and countless other websites have made clear for more than a decade, that's simply not true. And while being lazy, cheap and actively hostile to on-site community is any website's prerogative, this ignores the fact that online news comments are an excellent avenue for transparency and a tool to hold websites, and authors, accountable.

With so many websites muzzling community speech because they just so adore conversation, it's good to point out when websites swim upstream against this trend. For example the Intercept last month announced that the news outlet would be partnering with the The Coral Project at Mozilla to make their news comments system better via a myriad of changes to their commenting platform. The Coral Project interviewed some 300 individuals from 150 newsrooms in 30 countries as part of an effort to improve online discourse.

Informed by this research, The Intercept's changes include the ability to mute annoying users, the ability to track comment edits, a new offensive comment reporting feature, the "featuring" of exceptional comments by website staff, and the expanded ability of staff to interact with users that pose particularly important questions. Again, none of this is particularly revolutionary. Most of it involves treating readers like human beings. But in this day and age -- doing so is apparently now a revolutionary act.

As the Intercept's Glenn Greenwald and Rubina Madan Fillion note, lost in the vilification of comments sections as little more than troll gardens is the fact that on-site comments are a great way to hold journalists accountable:

"Journalists often tout their responsibility to hold the powerful accountable. Comments are a way to hold journalists themselves accountable. Unlike posts on social media, comments occupy the same space as the stories and travel with them as they’re shared across platforms. Comments also make it possible for people to share their reactions without having to connect them to a social media account. That’s why we continue to be strong proponents of comments and encourage our colleagues at The Intercept to read (and respond to) them."

Again, for better or worse news in the modern era is a conversation. Muting your on-site audience may feel good to editors on tight budgets, tired of trolls, and wistful for the bygone days of carefully-chosen letters to the editor, but it's doing your community (and the news industry at large) a disservice. As such, the Intercept's moves are a welcome change of pace for an industry that has spent the last few years insisting that muzzling your readership somehow represents a breathless dedication to quality online discourse.

Filed Under: comments, engagement, the intercept

Techdirt 2017: The Stats.

from the closing-the-books-on-2017 dept

Another yearly tradition is, after the new year, we try to take a look at some of the stats on traffic and commenters and such. I know many sites do this before the end of the year, but we're sort of a stickler for actually including the full year's data, so ours comes out sometime after the new year actually starts (and once I have time to really go through the data). For reference, you can see these stories from the past seven years as well: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011 and 2010. As I've mentioned in the past, for comment data, we use our own internal logs. For traffic data, we're using Google Analytics, which... has its own problems -- and which I'm sure many people block. But as we're using it mainly for comparative purposes, it functions as a "good enough" tool for those purposes, even if it may not be entirely accurate.

Every year it's fun to see where visitors are arriving from -- and this year Google says visitors showed up from 236 different countries (down three from last year). Since we've been doing this, US traffic has almost always been right around 67% of all our traffic, but this year it bumped up to 70.13%. The UK and Canada remain neck-and-neck and basically tied for second place, with the UK edging out Canada 5.9% to 5.8%. Australia, India, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Finland, and Sweden round out the top 10. The big movers this year were India passing Germany and Finland jumping into the top 10 (leapfrogging over Sweden) and pushing New Zealand out of the top 10.

Going around the globe, after India, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and Japan round out the top 5 in Asia. The new entrant here is South Korea who had been much lower in the past. In Europe, we've already named the top 6 in the overall top 10 list, but if you're wondering whose next: it's Ireland, Norway, Denmark and Spain. Russia appears to have dropped off the list -- despite quite a few stories mentioning Russia. Hmmm. In South America, Brazil represents exactly 50% of our traffic from that continent, followed by Argentina at 15%, Chile and Colombia each with 8%, and Peru at 7%. In Africa, last year we noted that in previous years most of our African traffic came from South Africa, with negligible amounts coming from elsewhere -- though we started to see traffic from Kenya and Nigeria last year. This year, South Africa still leads, but with just 40% of the African traffic. Nigeria has jumped up in a big way with 23%, followed by Kenya (7%), Egypt (5%), and Ghana (4%).

There's always some fun to explore down at the bottom of the list -- and this year we see things like one single visitor from North Korea -- which comes after two years of zero North Korean visits. Perhaps the country's internet is opening up after all (that's a joke for people who take things too literally).

As always, the country with the longest average duration visit is Gibraltar, and every year, PaulT takes credit for this as he should. Surprisingly, Bangladesh comes in second for duration on the site, and that's with a decent amount of traffic (over 10,000 visitors). If we're looking at larger countries with significant traffic, India, New Zealand and Canada seem to spend more time on the site than visitors from other countries.

As has been the case for a while, Chrome remains the most popular browser by far for visiting the site. While last year it broke 50% of all visits, this year it dropped to 48%. Safari is a strong second at 24%. Firefox checks in at 12%. Microsoft's Internet Explorer (4%) and Edge (2%) are barely noticeable -- though they still beat Opera at 0.6%. Windows is the top operating system at 41%, Android is second at 23%. iOS is (again) close with Android at 21%. Macs are 10% and Linux is 3%. Chrome OS shows up at 0.5%. And a miraculous 0.01% of you visited Techdirt on an Xbox. Really: you don't need to do that. I'm happy to see that I actually don't have very good data on what ISPs most of you are using, as it's showing up as "not set" for a bunch of folks, and the numbers on those who are revealing what ISP they're using aren't really big enough to determine very much. Hopefully, this means many of you are practicing good internet hygiene in cloaking information about your connection and what sites you're visiting.

For the past few years we've been posting the following chart of where our traffic comes from:

As I said last year, we pride ourselves on the fact that so many of our visitors come directly to the site, rather than relying on social media or search, like so many other sites do. Some argue that this means we're leaving traffic on the table by not focusing on pumping up social and search traffic. We like to believe we're building a more loyal audience who visits us because they like what we do -- and it also means we don't have to freak out every time a platform like Google or Facebook changes an algorithm. It's nice to see that our percentage of direct traffic has gone up this year, from 38.5% last year to 42.5% this year. Search traffic declined from 31.3% to 26.5%, while social went up a small amount from 17% to 18.1%.

For the sources that do send us traffic, however, Reddit leads the way (yet again), followed by Twitter and Facebook and Hacker News. Other specific sites that have sent us a decent amount of traffic include Instapundit, Drudge Report (though I think that was all from one story) and Popehat. For search traffic, most of the terms that sent a lot of traffic tended to be variation on "techdirt" -- showing how many people use the search bar for navigation these days. Two amusing search terms that ranked fairly high: "can you plagiarize yourself" and "louie louie lyrics." If you're wondering why we got a bunch of search traffic on that one, it's because of this 2015 story we did about the FBI spending years researching the lyrics trying to figure out what they mean and if they're bad -- before realizing that the Kingsmen must have submitted the lyrics to the Copyright Office.

And, with that, we move onto the big lists:

Top Ten Stories, by unique pageviews, on Techdirt for 2017:

1. Software Company Shows How Not To Handle Negative Review
2. FCC Releases Net Neutrality Killing Order, Hopes You're Too Busy Cooking Turkey To Read It
3. The FBI Is Apparently Paying Geek Squad Members To Dig Around In Computers For Evidence Of Criminal Activity
4. Dead People Mysteriously Support The FCC's Attack On Net Neutrality
5. Supreme Court Says You Can't Ban People From The Internet, No Matter What They've Done
6. Cops Sent Warrant To Facebook To Dig Up Dirt On Woman Whose Boyfriend They Had Just Killed
7. FCC Plan To Use Thanksgiving To 'Hide' Its Attack On Net Neutrality Vastly Underestimates The Looming Backlash
8. Sean Spicer Launches Witch Hunt Over The 'Secure' App He Just Said Was No Big Deal
9. Michigan Lawmaker Flees Twitter After Reports Highlight She Helped AT&T Push Anti-Competition Broadband Law
10. Techdirt's First Amendment Fight For Its Life

Glad to see the net neutrality posts got a lot of love this year, though it's not that surprising, I guess. As per usual, posts on the general theme of companies and governments behaving badly tend to be... popular. Perhaps that should be our official tagline...

2017's Top Ten Stories, by comment volume:

1. Techdirt's First Amendment Fight For its Life: 413 comments
2. Our Humanity: 398 comments
3. The FBI Is Apparently Paying Geek Squad Members To Dig Around In Computers For Evidence Of Criminal Activity: 358 comments
4. Defending Hateful Speech Is Unpleasant But Essential, Even When Violence Is The End Result: 322 comments
5. Nazis, The Internet, Policing Content And Free Speech: 288 comments
6. More Legislators Jump On The Blue Lives Matter Bandwagon: 268 comments
7. Case Dismissed: Judge Throws Out Shiva Ayyadurai's Defamation Lawsuit Against Techdirt: 259 comments
8. One Twitter Account's Mission To Make White Supremacists Very, Very Famous: 256 comments
9. Ajit Pai's Big Lie : 252 comments
10. Techdirt Survival Fund: I Support Journalism: 248 comments

As we point out every year, the number of comments on a story is often not a good indicator of how much traffic it gets. This year, there were only two posts that show up on both lists. Perhaps it's not surprising that this list differs from the traffic list in that it tends to stray more into "controversial" (read: political) topics than that first list. And, of course, those three posts about the lawsuit against us also received quite a lot of comments as well.

Okay, you've made it this far... so now we get to the part people are most interested in every year: the specific lists of individual commenters (well, registered commenters, at least). Obviously, we get a ton of anonymous comments or comments from people who put in usernames, but never register -- but we can't track those, so these lists are only to those who have actually registered.

2017 Top Commenters, by comment volume:

1. That One Guy: 1839 comments
2. PaulT: 1774 comments
3. Roger Strong: 1527 comments
4. Ninja: 1335 comments
5. orbitalinsertion: 1122 comments
6. Stephen T. Stone: 1101 comments
7. Anonymous Anonymous Coward: 682 comments
8. That Anonymous Coward: 680 comments
9. Bergman: 666 comments
10. MyNameHere: 657 comments

There's quite a drop off between the 6th and 7th place commenters, huh? It's nice to see some new entrants on the list this year -- with some big names in the past dropping beneath the comment threshold. Of course, one commenter who made last year's list under a different name is almost certainly on this year's list with his "new" name. I'll leave it to you to figure out which one. It should be fairly obvious for regular comment participants... I also don't know why, but I find it amusing that Anonymous Anonymous Coward and That Anonymous Coward came within 2 comments of one another.

Top 10 Most Insightful Commenters, based on how many times they got the light bulb icon: Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the lightbulb

1. That One Guy: 328 comments (18%)
2. Roger Strong: 239 comments (16%)
3. PaulT: 191 comments (11%)
4. Stephen T. Stone: 129 comments (12%)
5. That Anonymous Coward: 111 comments (16%)
6. Ninja: 102 comments (8%)
7. Mike Masnick: 58 comments (17%)
8. TechDescartes: 47 comments (17%)
9. Anonymous Anonymous Coward: 46 comments (7%)
10. Uriel-238: 42 comments (9%)

Not as many changes on this list, though it's only the second year I made this list (with a much higher percentage than last year too!). That One Guy continues his reign at the top of this list -- this is his third year in a row winning the top spot (by a wide margin each time). Roger Strong made a big jump from number 9 last year to number 2 this year, jumping past PaulT (among others) who was in second place last year only to slip to 3rd this year, despite a much higher number of comments getting flagged as insightful. Nice going everyone.

Top 10 Funniest Commenters, based on how many times they got the LOL icon: Parentheses shows what percentage of their comments got the LOL icon

1. Roger Strong: 138 comments (9%)
2. TechDescartes: 74 comments (28%)
3. Stephen T. Stone: 24 comments (2%)
4. That One Guy: 24 comments (1%)
5. That Anonymous Coward: 17 comments (3%)
6. Toom1275: 15 comments (5%)
7. Vidiot: 13 comments (9%)
8. stderric: 13 comments (5%)
9. Ninja: 12 comments (1%)
10. MyNameHere: 11 comments (2%)

Last year we noted that TechDescartes had shown up towards the end of 2015 but still managed to make it deep into the list of funniest comments that year, and then last year TechDescartes absolutely dominated the leader board. However, this year, Roger Strong leapfrogs over TechDescartes with a huge number of funny comments (though TechDescartes still has an astoundingly high batting average). There's a pretty spectacular drop off after those two. Some of you commenters need to up your funny game -- especially when it appears that at least one of the winners on this list is there sarcastically (I'll leave it to you to figure out who).

Okay. With that, the books are closed, and folks need to rev up their commenting engines to get a jump on 2018's list... See you in the comments.

Filed Under: comments, the numbers, the stats

Months Later, And People Are Still Discovering Their Dead Loved Ones Were Used To Support Killing Net Neutrality

from the disinformation-nation dept

By now we've well-established that the FCC's attempt to repeal net neutrality rules has been rife with fraud. From fake DDOS attacks to bogus comments during the open comment period, there was a fairly obvious effort made by the FCC and a mysterious ally (gosh, who benefits?) to downplay massive public opposition to the plan. And while the FCC has completely blocked law enforcement investigations into which group was behind these efforts, you can expect significantly more details to emerge during the court battles in the new year.

That said, nearly four months have passed since the FCC closed its public comment period, and we're still finding new instances of identity theft, or cases where a dead loved one's identity was used to justify the FCC's blatant handout to telecom duopolies. For example, the brother of Stranger Things star Sean Astin posted on Twitter that their dead mother's identity had been used to help kill net neutrality:

Many folks are only now understanding the scope of the fraud thanks to this tool provided by the New York Attorney General's office, which is investigating the fraud. Unsurprisingly, folks that have discovered their dead loved ones are being used as political props to help Comcast aren't particularly happy about it:

Even Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley says his name was used by the hackers to falsely support killing net neutrality:

And do you know what the Trump FCC is doing about this? Bupkis. Nothing. Zero. It's fairly clear by now that the goal all along was to undermine public trust in the integrity of the comment period in the hopes of downplaying legitimate public opposition to the repeal. But if journalists, activists and citizens can obtain data tying the fraudulent comments to an ISP-funded organization, next year's court battle over the repeal could get very interesting, very quickly.

Filed Under: comments, fake comments, fcc, net neutrality

NY Attorney General Finds 2 Million Fake FCC Net Neutrality Comments

from the zombie-votes dept

As Ajit Pai's attack on net neutrality rolls along, it's worth a steady reminder that the FCC's open commenting period for the public was marred by spam-bots inserting comments from some list somewhere, all in support of Pai's actions. In other words, the period during which the FCC is supposed to listen to the general public for feedback never actually existed, masked as it was by these fraudulent comments.

Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, about whom we've not always written kindly, set up a searchable site through which you can find if you or anyone you know has their names in these FCC comments and, if their comment is in support of the government, you can verify whether you or they actually made that comment or not. You might be surprised by the answer you get, however, as Schneiderman announced this week that they have found -- so far -- that at least two million fake comments used real people's names to support Pai and the FCC.

"Millions of fake comments have corrupted the FCC public process—including two million that stole the identities of real people, a crime under New York law," Schneiderman said in an announcement today. "Yet the FCC is moving full steam ahead with a vote based on this corrupted process, while refusing to cooperate with an investigation."

Some comments were submitted under the names of dead people.

"My LATE husband's name was fraudulently used after a valiant battle with cancer," one person told the AG's office. "This unlawful act adds to my pain that someone would violate his good name."

I actually have a family member who's name was used in this way as well, so this touches somewhat close to home. Now, it's worth noting that these two million fake comments are just those that use other's very real names. It is not a sum total of all fake comments that might be included in the 23 million or so that the FCC collected. But if we're already starting from a place where we know for sure that 8 or 9 percent of those comments are fraudulent right off the bat, you'd assume Pai and the FCC would be some kind of interested in figuring out how this all happened.

But Pai has gone the other direction on all of this. He, or his spokespeople, have made odd noises about "erring on the side of inclusion" regarding these astroturf comments, all of which conveniently support him. If bending over backwards to make sure his FCC considers the opinions of the dead and those who have had their names misused just to make sure his ISP clients constituents get to ISP all over the open internet isn't the biggest slap in the face I've ever seen, then I don't know what would be. Meanwhile, Schneiderman is trying to investigate all of this since, you know, an actual crime was committed here, and has been essentially stonewalled by Pai and the FCC. This week he fired off a letter to the FCC, desperately trying to get them to cooperate with his investigation.

One might expect a federal agency to harbor a great deal of concern when faced with strong evidence of a massive fraud uncovered by multiple sources—including, most recently, The Wall Street Journal—that appears to have thoroughly infected its most important rulemaking since the establishment of net neutrality more than a decade ago. Yet, over the objections of a growing bipartisan coalition of over thirty members of both houses of Congress, 18 [other] state attorneys general, and FCC Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Mignon Clyburn, the Commission's leadership appears determined to proceed with its December 14 vote. Moving forward with this vote would make a mockery of the notice and comment process mandated by the Administrative Procedure Act and reward those who perpetrated this fraud in service of their own hidden agenda.

The most cynical among us might think that the agenda isn't so hidden, if it was indeed Pai or someone associated with him pulling this all off. That's overly conspiratorial, perhaps, except that Pai's lame excuses of protecting privacy for not turning over commonplace evidence such as IP addresses to the NY AG's office makes this all look really, really dirty.

Regardless, it's clear the public record during the comment period was nullified by these fake comments. To date, 19 AGs from across the country have called for a delay in the FCC's vote so that they can investigate all of this. Pai, as has become his custom, isn't listening, despite wanting to err on the side of inclusion.

Filed Under: comments, eric schneiderman, fake comments, fcc

New York AG Provides Tool To Help You Check If Your Name Was Used To Support Killing Net Neutrality

from the shenanigans dept

So we've noted several times now how the FCC's open comment period for its Orwell-inspired "Restoring Internet Freedom" net neutrality proceeding was simply awash in all manner of fraud. From bots that filled the comment proceeding with bogus support from fake or even dead people, to fake DDoS attacks intended to downplay the wash of angry users that flooded to the agency's website in protest. All of this stuff is more than likely to pop up in the inevitable lawsuits that are filed in the new year after the net neutrality repeal formally hits the federal register.

In addition, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman recently stated he has been conducting an investigation for the last six months into these bogus comments. In a letter recently sent to FCC boss Ajit Pai, Schneiderman notes that he reached out to the FCC nine times over a period of five months to get the agency's help in getting a closer look at the APIs and server logs related to the fraud campaign. And that time and time again the FCC ignored its request:

"Specifically, for six months my office has been investigating who perpetrated a massive scheme to corrupt the FCC’s notice and comment process through the misuse of enormous numbers of real New Yorkers’ and other Americans’ identities. Such conduct likely violates state law — yet the FCC has refused multiple requests for crucial evidence in its sole possession that is vital to permit that law enforcement investigation to proceed.

We reached out for assistance to multiple top FCC officials, including you, three successive acting FCC General Counsels, and the FCC’s Inspector General. We offered to keep the requested records confidential, as we had done when my office and the FCC shared information and documents as part of past investigative work.

Yet we have received no substantive response to our investigative requests. None."

That mirrors my own experience in trying to get the FCC's help after somebody hijacked my identity (and the identity of one of my employers) to falsely claim (twice, using two different bogus addresses) I support killing net neutrality protections. The general consensus is that while the FCC isn't likely directly behind this fraudulent activity, it's refusing to help because 1) exposing the culprit could expose the industry-linked groups behind it and 2) raising questions about the legitimacy of the one chance the public had to give feedback helps downplay the massive public opposition to the FCC's plan.

Regardless, the NY AG is proceeding with its investigation without the FCC's help. As part of that push, it has revealed a new tool on its website that lets you check to see if your name was improperly used to support killing net neutrality. Those findings are then submitted to the AG for use in its investigation and as evidence in any looming lawsuits.

Again, this is just one potential avenue of inquiry into this entire, rather grotesque affair. The FCC is also being sued by journalists for ignoring FOIA requests related to the comment fraud, for refusing to be transparent about its meetings with large ISPs eager to see the rules repealed, and for hiding details of the DDoS attack that wasn't. These will all be joined by numerous lawsuits in the new year filed by consumer groups and smaller companies, who are likely chomping at the bit to prove the FCC violated agency procedure (and potentially the law) in its rush to give consumers the tech policy equivalent of a giant middle finger.

Filed Under: comments, eric schneiderman, fcc, net neutrality