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Comment by DoofusOfDeath | Hacker News Reader

> At the risk of coming off as some bleeding heart liberal, what's to stop corporations from doing this kind of stuff all the time?

This doesn't strike as being a conservative vs. liberal issue. Most of us can probably agree that it's an unacceptable attack on the foundations of a representative democracy.

And as a social conservative with strong "law and order" leanings, the apparent fraud and identity theft make me very angry. The unwillingness of the federal government to investigate this only adds to my frustration and anger, because it smacks of (at least) passive corruption.

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>This doesn't strike as being a conservative vs. liberal issue

From the article:

>The companies and groups subpoenaed on Tuesday, according to the person with knowledge of the investigation, include Broadband for America, Century Strategies and MediaBridge. Broadband for America is a coalition supported by cable and telecommunications companies; Century Strategies is a political consultancy founded by Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition; and MediaBridge is a conservative messaging firm whose website boasts of helping to place hundreds of thousands of comments on net neutrality during Mr. Obama’s presidency on behalf of one client.

The hidden assumption that explains the grandparent comment is "conservative == attacker of the foundations of democracy" and being opposed to that makes you a communist or something. It demonstrates just how far the overton window has been shoved by partisan rhetoric.

Uggggghhh, this isn't an attack upon democracy any more than being spammed on Reddit. It isn't corrupting a vote for office or legislation. It is, however, an easily corrupted online comment system that is merely informative and not in any way asserting an outcome or action.

If you want to reduce spam and bot participation there needs to be a formal registration process with multifactor authentication of unique identifiers and it must not be anonymous.

> Uggggghhh, this isn't an attack upon democracy any more than being spammed on Reddit. It isn't corrupting a vote for office or legislation. It is, however, an easily corrupted online comment system that is merely informative and not in any way asserting an outcome or action.

Actually, since the FCC proposal specifically called for soliciting public comments to inform the decision, those comments can be seen as influencing the outcome, since lawmakers were expected to read and consider them.

It is an attack on Democracy in a very roundabout way (roundabout because this wasn't an election, it was regulatory action put in place by officials that were put in place by elected officials). But in any case, citizens were asked for what they thought in a way that affected an outcome they would have to legally abide, and it appears that their voices where stifled. That actually is a fairly obvious attack on Democracy in general, even if it's only an attack on our Democracy at a distance.

As you stated, the purpose is to inform, not vote or poll. The content of a comment is informative or it's not. How is it relevant that it was posted by a bot? How was any commenter stifled?

Officials were already aware of the range of possible opinions. The distribution of those opinions among the general public is informative, and bots were used to intentionally distort reality.

Notice and comment is required by the Administrative Procedure Act for rule-makings, not so the agency can solicit peoples' opinions, but to gather relevant legal and policy arguments and data.

In fact, if an agency said "we picked rule A because that is what the most people wanted," that would probably be an error that could warrant reversal of the rule in court. The whole point of agencies is that they're experts insulated from the political process. Their job is to analyze the law and the data to reach a reasoned conclusion (e.g. by conducting a cost-benefit analysis). Courts will reverse an agency if they engage in fallacious or erroneous reasoning. Deciding that an option is better because it is more popular would be such an error.

> Notice and comment is required by the Administrative Procedure Act for rule-makings, not so the agency can solicit peoples' opinions, but to gather relevant legal and policy arguments and data.

That's interesting. So does "we got a lot of comments from people noting how they've experienced what looks like monopolistic behavior in isolated instances that might inform whether can can expect this behavior to increase/decrease if we rule for/against the action?" count as or towards a policy argument? Legal arguments I can see being fairly specific, but policy (to my mind at least) is much more open to interpretation. Or is there some specific legal definition of policy argument they must adhere to here?

However, given enough negative feedback, an agency may decide to decline to make a rule, or in this case repeal a rule.

Do you have an example of that in the context of administrative procedure?

An online comment system will not provide a valid statistical survey.

They had polls. Nobody with a brain is using anonymous comments for that type of measurement.

Lets turn this around: Why do you feel its not a problem that a company impersonated people in order to stuff the comment box?

The problem is the comment box is easily stuffed. If you really want to turn this around why do you think quantity of anonymous comments is worthy of consideration?

No, you first. You claimed it wasn't a big deal. Explain why it's not a big deal that these large complained were flat out settling the identities of people to make it appear like they had support.

It’s very simple to me: either we want direct communication to government to have weight, and we prosecute fraud like this rigorously, or we don’t think it is worth it (for whatever reason), and we have a government that must ignore the voice of the people outside elections.

Great, then ensure that communication is valid from an actual person and never anonymous. If you aren’t willing to take communication seriously then it certainly shouldn’t have any weight.

That’s what the names and addresses where for, these comments weren’t anonymous, the government just lacks a way to verify citizens digitaly other than this trivially broken method.

But fraud no matter how easy it is to commit is still fraud. Lying to the FBI is easy to do and probably easy to get away with, but people often don’t because the penalties are severe if you are caught. A similar system could work here if there was political will to prosecute this fraud.

> It isn't corrupting a vote for office or legislation.

This is only true if you somehow believe that no one is affected by things they read online ever.

Gullible people online aren’t the decision makers. Only the 5 FCC chairs are.

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