FCC: Take your spam and shove it, slacktivists! Some theoretical physicists have advanced the hypothesis that we may be living in a simulation, a kind of computer game. I wonder where they got that idea? Here on Earth, online politics has been a game for some years. Long before gamification was a buzzword, the first "Googlewash" demonstrated how politics could be turned …
A word to the wise; "the Tragedy of the Commons" is a dead giveaway for a thoughtless kneejerker.
There never was a "the Tragedy of the Commons" - the notion was invented, without evidence, by the Victorian economist William Forster Lloyd. His only example was the English Common Field System - which worked very well for hundreds of years.
Ever since, those who wished to grab common property for themselves have been citing it as "evidence".
@strum: well, that's nice for you, but in my world: spam is a problem, pollution is a problem, congestion is a problem; deforestation, desertification, climate change, network congestion, world banking and insurance - all these things are problems because costs are being externalised. That's all the TotC means, and I don't see how it's deniable.
Check the IP of the person filling out the form. If it comes from a physical location outside the geo-political realm of the affected area, an IP from Korea in a petition about an American tax issue for example, then simply have the petition completion screen inform the user that they've just wasted their time as they don't qualify due to their location. Drop the input, don't even bother to save the data, & go on to the next person.
You can have it filter for names such as Donald Trump, you can have it set aside ones with foul language as potentially irrelevant, & you can kill off any repeats from multiple sources such that it indicates a high probability of merely being a copy&paste job from a different form elsewhere.
If you get something from "Mister E." that claims to live at "1234 Any Street, Anytown, USA 90210" then you can stuff it in the bin as utter bullshit. You can sort the entries into levels of probability of being utter shit, count the ones of low, have someone examine the medium, & flush the high.
I tried to fill out the form last night & the site timed out on me multiple times. I waited patiently, kept reloading the page until it responded, & started to fill out the form. It timed out WHILE it was being filled out, rendering my attempts pointless. Sure there's a zillion people all trying to do the same task, but after the FIRST time this issue brought the site to it's knees, you would think they learned to reinforce the capabilities to handle the capacity. Evidently not.
A shame that the Federal Communications Commission can't handle the task of being communicated at by "too many people at once". What, you expect people to NOT flood the system after what happened last time?
IP checking is useless. Anyone can get a proxy and bounce their response through there. Also you are disenfranchising those citizens who are currently stationed in/based in/visiting the foreign country but are definitely invested in the issue at hand. At least in the UK, the WhoIsYourMP and Parliament Petition system insist you provide your/a UK address (that it can be verified behind the scenes), but I guess unless systems like the USPS and local governmental information (like electoral rolls) can be used to verify people, you'll *always* have the dodgy stuff floating around.
"IP checking is useless. Anyone can get a proxy and bounce their response through there."
Can they? Most users I know of can't get the volume on Skype to work without input from an IT consultant. And even if they can, it's additional effort. Making an act of trolling require any more effort than just clicking and typing will turn away 90% of slacktivists - hence why so many of them replied with the name '1'.
It's a bit like that weird suicide bridge in China - it had like 100+ people throwing themselves off the bridge every year. They found just putting an easily-climbed barrier around the bridge cut the number of jumpers by 90%, because now killing yourself needed a slight amount of effort to achieve and people who were literally in the process of trying to kill themselves thought 'wait, I'd have to pull myself over a waist-high barrier? Fuck that, it sounds too much like exercise'.
"Your contempt of "most users" notwithstanding (albeit probably not far off the mark)"
I wasn't being contemptuous. It's literally true. Most users cannot do anything outside their usual daily tasks on a computer, and there's no reason to assume that they should be able to, or that it makes them stupid for not being able to. I can't operate half the software that they use either, since an in-depth knowledge of CAD software simply never comes up in my day-to-day life. That doesn't make me stupid either.
The vast majority of users don't have the slightest idea of what a proxy is, or how you'd tell your computer to use one, or even why you'd want to. As for programming a spam bot... why would you assume that they're doing that, as opposed to just downloading one off the shelf?
Look, if you want to talk slacktivism, look at actual slacktivists rather than postulating the existence of some kind of hyper-intelligent superengineer with an in-depth understanding of networking principles and a working knowledge of Java. Thankfull,y we have loads of examples from the real world of who they actually are. Take a look at Anonymous's Project Chanology, for example, the infamous attack on the Church of Scientology back in 2008. They used a network stress-testing tool called Low Orbit Ion Cannon to commit DDOS attacks. The guys using it didn't write a DDOS tool, they just downloaded it. The majority of them had no idea that their IP addresses could be traced from it, and that they'd need to use VPNs or proxies to mask the traffic. They were not IT engineers and had no clue what the tool itself was actually doing, they just knew that if you put a name in the address bar, it would knock the website offline. They were mostly just kids, and many of them were horrified when the police turned up at their door because they simply didn't know that the traffic could be traced back to their computers.
THAT is the vast majority of the people we're discussing here. They're accountants, or architects, or customer service advisers, or shop assistants. They want to do something about political subject X, and they know that they can download this tool to enable them to do it, but without the slightest understanding of the context or consequences of their actions and with no idea how to cover their tracks or evade even basic countermeasures. They'll use the tool which achieves the objective, but they're not going toknow about the other tools which ill enable them to hide the fact they've done it.
the legit ones require you to identify yourself and at least give an e-mail address. however, I can create as many e-mail addresses as I want to with 2 different domains, and so I could easily appear as several people if I wanted to...
I wonder how many of the astro-turfers are sponsored by George Soros...
Good thoughts though maybe unworkable. I know of two non-profit orgs that offer boilerplate text for issues pertaining their members. Neither org is considered small with one having something like 5 million members. The catch is, many folks have no clue how to write a letter to government on challenging something thus, the cut and paste boiler plate.
Bottom line... there may not be a one size fits all solution to this problem and it is a real problem.
It should be a trivial matter to detect all submissions with identical wording, merge them into a single submission, and then just attach the number of times it was received as metadata. That would make spam campaigns far, far easier to manager.
So there's no earthly reason why some human should have to read through all those submissions individually. Except, of course, for the bit where you're already looking for a pretext to ignore them.
Try to explain that to people who like to do the quick form response to feel better while doing... nothing (well, clicking a button).
MPs and councils have also been clear that when they discover that form letters have been used (like the 38Degrees, Change.org etc ones) for petitions or 'demand your MP take action' things, they tend to a) ignore them, or b) treat them as a singular petition response. Even petitions collected in a classic form (you know... write your name and address on a list) tend to be considered as a 'single objection' instead of 'these 834 people object'.
If you really want to see a response from your local politicians, start with the form letters, but change their contents sufficiently that it shows you've actually put some thought into it, spent some effort trying to articulate your personal views, and you're actually invested in the response.
"If you really want to see a response from your local politicians, start with the form letters, but change their contents sufficiently that it shows you've actually put some thought into it, spent some effort trying to articulate your personal views, and you're actually invested in the response."
I always hand craft my queries to my UK MPs. The responses I have received from my MPs of both major parties have been consistent. A copy of some ministerial statement on an issue that is either different - or ignores the points I have raised. Slacktivism is on both sides of the counter.
In one case you could still read a redacted name and address on the photocopied reply. It was originally sent to someone else - about the same bill, but a very different, issue.
You need to ask them to take a specific action to which they have to reply; "Will you vote against this measure when it comes before the house?" - that sort of thing. By all means express your views, but don't forget to ask them to give a commitment about what THEY are going to do. Make it clear you are not that interested in their party's policy, what you're trying to influence is how your representative actually votes, because that's all that really matters.
No, what displaced this is the level of partisanship, where each side thinks no reasonable person could possibly disagree with their viewpoint, so the other side must be nuts / communist / fascist / stupid / racist / etc. More recently it looks like one side wants to have its own news and own facts, which only widens the gulf further.
I suppose you can persuade people in the middle who aren't invested in either side's craziness, but the ones who turn up, whether they are rabid Bernie/Stein supporters or rabid Trump/Cruz supporters, are exactly the sort of people you do NOT want representing your "side" if you want to see those people in the middle to agree with your viewpoint.
A $ 0.10 fee to submit a response would seem to fit the bill here - only people who can be bothered to get out a credit card, and therefore verify themselves in the process, would be able to submit the form.
Give the money to charity to make it clear it is not intended as a fee.
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