FCC received 444,938 comments from Russian email addresses | Hacker News Reader

FCC received 444,938 comments from Russian email addresses

bloomberg.com

42 pointsavs7335 comments

What exactly is a “Russian email address?” Yes, I read the article. It did not answer this question (although it was humble enough to acknowledge that “the report presented no evidence that the comments were linked to the Russian government.”)

This finger pointing at Russia is becoming a national embarrassment. It’s almost racist how willfully people talk about “Russian” activity as if everyone from Russia is a representative of Vladimir Putin. It’s especially ironic that the same journalists perpetuating this narrative would feel quite outraged if “the Russians” applied the same logic to them, by assuming every American is a representative of Donald Trump.

Not sure if these folks have an angle as i have not checked them out, but they claim they've found obvious fraud:

http://www.emprata.com/reports/fcc-restoring-internet-freedo...

Their findings are pretty interesting.

I don't think fraud should be surprising when you have a 0 verification online open comment section where people seem to think that getting more 'votes' than the other guy would mean the FCC has to go that direction. It'd be like an election where you vote online with no verification whatsoever. I imagine by the end of the election the US's apparent population would be in the tens of billions, at least. Quite the voter turnout!

While I agree that that breakdown was quite interesting, I also think in the end trying to divine the 'true' result from a mess like this is probably going to be about as effective as diving your future from the tea leaves at the bottom of a cup.

I think this comes down to how "Russian agent" is qualified. At least in terms of Twitter's search it counted anybody using Russian characters, that had ever logged in from a Russian IP, or had transactions from a Russian bank. There's two absurdities here - first how many Americans would be counted, by a similar metric, as being "American agents" against countless other nations? Did you talk about Brexit from a US IP? You're an "American agent" trying to interfere with the UK's election and national sovereignty!

Perhaps the most interesting part is while this qualification qualifies countless unaffiliated individuals as "national agents", it likely all but entirely excludes anybody who actually is a national agent. If I'm a government engaged in a conspiracy to target another nation, you know the most basic things I'm not going to do? There's this completely absurd notion in the media that Russians are some sort of collective of super-hackers and media masters capable of shaking nations and changing elections with a negligible subpercent fraction of total impressions -- yet apparently they haven't yet learned how to use fancy software like TOR, forget to not write in Cyrillic, and also connected their accounts to Russian banks?

I think this is a major problem with media in general. In the US many people do not want to believe that Americans voted how they did. And so when an explanation comes along that helps them confirm this bias, critical thinking is completely thrown out the window. Of course this problem obviously is not relegated to just this issue, but the repetitive banality of this particular one is disturbing. It casts a rather negative shadow over most of the media.

>even though it’s unclear if they were from actual Russian citizens or computer bots originating in the U.S. or elsewhere.

As a Russian, very few people here even know that FCC exists. Among those that do, very few care. Already got too much on our own plates.

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