Fake Politics

How Corporate and Government Groups Create and Maintain a Monopoly on Truth

Jason Bisnoff

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781510705487
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Propaganda
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In "grassroots" campaigns, the grass isn't always green—or natural. In today's chaotic world, where the multiplication of information sources creates competing narratives, credibility is the key to winning the war of ideas. This is the reason why governments and corporations resort to astroturfing—creation of ostensibly grassroots movements set up to advance political agendas and commercial campaigns. The democratization of information and polarization of politics offer a perfect storm. Fake Politics tells the stories of how this practice has transformed political activism into a veiled lobbying effort by the rich and the powerful. Through a series of vignettes involving the tea party, oil industry, big tobacco, big data, and news media, this book will explore the similarities and differences between various campaigns that appeared as grassroots but, in reality, were lobbying efforts fueled by governments, corporations, major industries, and religious institutions.The process, named for the artificial grass fields at football stadiums and high schools across the country, became so prevalent in the last two decades that it now sits at a tipping point. In the era of "fake news" and "alternative facts, " with the truth well on its way to becoming indistinguishable from fabrication, what can the past of astroturfing tell us about the future of grassroots activism?

CHAPTER 1

ASTROTURFED AGENCIES

As the debate waged on in early 2018 about the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) potential decision to repeal net neutrality rules put in place in 2013 by the Obama administration, a public docket was set up to solicit public comment on the policy. A story by James V. Grimaldi and Paul Overberg detailed the Wall Street Journal’s discovery of thousands of counterfeit comments pertaining to that rule and going even further into other federal agencies and other proposed rulemakings. The story says the comments “appear to be stolen identities posted by computers programmed to pile comments onto the dockets.”¹

The Journal went on to find almost 7,800 people who claimed comments posted in their name were falsified. The implication spanned several federal agencies but primarily the FCC docket. The fake comments were found on both sides of the debate, both favoring anti-regulation as well as regulation. The posts were made without the permission of those who were named and, in many cases, were unbeknownst to those named.

The public docket is the chief mechanism for the public to participate in federal rulemaking. The legally mandated public-comment process can impact regulations that in turn impact millions of Americans and the decision makers who rule over the process are often not up for election; therefore this comment process is among the only times they hear from the electorate. Furthermore, to knowingly make “false, fictitious or fraudulent statements” to a US agency is illegal, according to 18 U.S. Code § 1001.

Where the fraudulent slips toward the telltale signs of astroturfing is in the fine print. In many government rulemakings, there are parties on both sides of the divide with much to gain in influence, as well as financially. If you specifically look at the net neutrality debate it is starkly evident. On one side of the fold are major telecommunication companies such as Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast who hold the keys to the internet and stand to gain a laundry list of additional chargeable services if net neutrality is repealed. On the other side of the coin, internet titans like Facebook, Netflix, and Google have benefitted from net neutrality as they have been able to use the freedom of the internet to build powerful corporations.

On the FCC website, the Journal found 818,000 identical postings in support of the new policy, effectively superseding and revoking net neutrality. A survey conducted by the Journal and Mercury Analytics found that 72 percent of a random sample of 2,757 people with emails used to post those nearly million identical comments had “nothing to do with them.”² A word-for-word copied comment supporting net neutrality appeared on the FCC website over 300,000 times. The problem spread beyond the FCC and net neutrality to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). There were instances of people who had nothing to do with the comments or addresses used that were nonexistent. There was even the case of a comment from Donna Duthie of Lake Bluff, Illinois. Duthie had been dead a dozen years. Even the newspaper conducting the survey was not exempt from whatever mechanism was aiming to muddy the democratic waters. One comment filed with the SEC was submitted by “Jason Blake, commentator, The Wall Street Journal.” It surely was an easy bit of reporting for Grimaldi and Overberg to figure out that the Journal has never had an employee with that name.

That comment was removed by the SEC and the commission told the Journal that letters that can’t be attributed to known people “are assessed during the course of the rule-making process.”³

A CFPB spokesman offered sentiments of concern for the “inauthentic data” but conceded that they did not ask for personal information necessary to assist in identity authentication, while an FERC spokeswoman offered that those who believe they had been misrepresented in comments should contact the agency. An FCC spokesman said that many of the comments that were fake do not have a substantial impact on rules and that without the resources to investigate, they air on the side of openness to comment.

While the Administrative Procedure Act mandates the aforementioned comment process and also says that the federal agencies need to take the comments under consideration, they do not need to adhere to them or rule based on them. Where the comments can prove most impactful is when regulated entities appeal regulations to a subsequent administration, Congress, or the courts in order to overturn a rule, alter a rule, or slow down the implementation of a rule. They can use a failure to consider comments as an argument in their case and there is precedent for judges to compel an agency to address ignored comments.

Despite the red-handed evidence in other cases contained in this book, where admissions or collective wisdom presented the astroturfing to be a clear, deceptive effort, the net neutrality case only shows a questionable coincidence of motives and actions. That was enough for Grimaldi and Overberg to mention it in their story. The crux of their story found behaviors similar to previous astroturfing efforts:

But postings the Journal uncovered went beyond being merely duplicative. They included comments from stolen e-mail addresses, defunct e-mail accounts, and people who unwittingly gave permission for their comments to be posted. Hundreds of identities on fake comments were found listed in an online catalog of hacks and breaches.

While many fakes were anti-regulatory, the Journal also found pro-regulatory comments on the FCC and FERC websites where people said they didn’t post them. In most of those cases, the people surveyed said they agreed with the comments, indicating that while they didn’t authorize them, a group or individual might have had their names in a list of like-minded people, possibly from the organization posting it. Some of these people said they were angry that someone who had access to their e-mail address would post it, even though they agreed.⁴

Where there is smoke, there’s fire. The largest concentration of fake comments came where the telecom giants met the internet titans all wrapped in a politically divisive and hot-button issue: the FCC and net neutrality. That proposal generated twenty-three million comments, speculated to be “the most a federal agency has received on a rule,”⁵ according to the Journal. What better place to make an attempt at astroturfing?

The potential abuse of democracy came in the midst of an influx of activity following a segment on the FCC decision on HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. That initial rash of support for the Obama-era policy was followed by an equally fervent backlash against it. The Journal spoke to a web programmer, Chris Sinchok, who spotted a “sharp increase” in one specific comment repeating: “The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation.”⁶ The duplicates rolled in at a staggering rate of one thousand comments in ten minutes followed by silence. This evoked the imagery of “web robots . . . turning on and off,” and led the programmer to say that “many were from hacked accounts.”⁷

Sinchok and Fight for the Future, a pro–net neutrality group, wrote about the phenomenon online, hypothesizing that it may have been based on stolen identities. That lead to a criminal investigation by former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in May 2017.

The aforementioned comment and its duplicates exceeded any other comment, according to the Journal and Quid Inc., which analyzed the content for them. It had been posted more than 818,000 times on the FCC site. The Journal sent surveys to 531,000 of the emails associated with the comments, and the results were curious. Seven thousand emails bounced back from defunct addresses, while 2,757 responded to the survey. Of those who responded, 1,994 said the comment was falsely submitted, a staggering 72 percent fake rate with an estimated margin of error of less than 2 points. As is abundantly clear: “The survey’s results, Mercury Analytics CEO Ron Howard said, are ‘a very significant indication of fraud.’”⁸

Howard told the Journal: “Generating tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of fake posts on public comment websites for the purpose of swaying public opinion and impacting the opinions of political decision makers is wide-scale not limited to a party, not limited to an issue, and not limited to a social ideology.”

Even the vast amount who agreed with the comments that bore their name were upset and disconcerted at the abuse of their identity.

In an examination by the Journal, looking at 2.8 million of the 23 million comments, surveys were sent to 956,000 addresses including the aforementioned 531,000 who used the common “unprecedented regulatory power” language. The survey aimed to verify the identities of commenters and was sent out in four groups. The groups opposing regulation had fraud rates of 63 percent, 72 percent, and 80 percent. The only group examined that was pro-regulation was 32 percent fake.

Among 10.1 million comments analyzed by a research firm commissioned by the Journal, there were four hundred templates found. Additionally, 1.3 million comments had similar clauses and wording chopped up into different combinations with the same sentiment: against net neutrality.

The Journal explained further: “‘Tom Wheeler’s power grab,’ a reference to former FCC Chairman Thomas Wheeler, appeared in 37,531 comments. Praise for the pre-Obama ‘light-touch policy’ appeared in 68,141. The Journal surveyed a random sample of 920 people associated with the 1.3 million cluster; 737, or 80 [percent], said they didn’t submit the comments.”

This was only the shallow end of the pool. An FCC spokesman told the Journal that they received more than 7.5 million comments that used the same short-form letter supporting the current rules from only 45,000 unique email addresses “all generated by a single fake e-mail generator website,” according to the spokesman. He added that they also received 400,000 comments in favor of the status quo from an identical Russian email address.

Data analytics firm Emprata analyzed the comments and found 7.75 million comments, or 36 percent, can be attributed to FakeMailGenerator.com, which, quite clearly from its name, creates one-time emails but cannot receive incoming mail. The Journal cautioned that that analysis was commissioned by several telecom firms that openly support the Trump administration’s proposal. That sample contained a large swath of almost identical comments, a vast majority of which opposed the proposal. The story also quoted the Emprata CEO insisting the study was done in a nonpartisan fashion.

At the time of the Journal’s story, December 2017, there were cries for probes, criminal investigations, and any manner of federal oversight or restitution. In June 2018, the rules were officially repealed despite plans from the Government Accountability Office to look into the information-security controls at the FCC and as part of that the internet comment mechanism.

The troubling signs found in the FCC comments were not lost on more powerful persons, with twenty-eight senators writing a letter to the FCC asking for a delay in the net neutrality decision that was not granted despite the senators pointing out how rife with pollution the comment pool was.

The astroturfing efforts extended to other government regulators and regulations being debated. More than four thousand fake comments directed at the CFPB came through IssueHound, which charges interest groups to use its software to bring together people with shared opinions for these types of efforts. However, it is usually with pre-written statements sent to lawmakers or regulators versus comments on a regulation.

Comments on a proposed CFPB payday lending regulation included two hundred thousand comments with more than one hundred sentences each appearing in 350 separate comments. The Journal went on to review those comments with 40 percent of survey respondents saying they didn’t send the comments that, in the studied comments assessed by Quid, opposed the new regulations.

Ashley Marie Mireles was among those respondents and the Journal found that her comment originated from IssueHound and TelltheCFPB.com[URL inactive], a site set up by a payday-lending trade group. Other comments were found with the same origin and falsified identities.

The Journal reported: “The payday-lending trade group, Community Financial Services Association of America, used IssueHound and TelltheCFPB.com[URL inactive] to send comments on the payday-lending rule, said Dennis Shaul, the group’s CEO.”⁹

Shaul denied that the effort was anything more than a letter-writing campaign and expressed exasperation and disappointment at the Journal findings. The rules are going into place all the same in July 2019.

The same writers at the Wall Street Journal found the same suspicious discrepancies in the comments posted about the Department of Labor’s proposed fiduciary rule.

Among the thousands of comments to appear were a significant number of fakes, positioned against the proposed rulemaking and aimed at combating conflicts of interest when it came to financial retirement advice.

The rule would require investment advisers who guide retirement accounts to act in the client’s best interest. It was proposed during the Obama administration but not scheduled for implementation in full until July 2019, after a delay by the Trump administration. Eventually the rule was nullified in the courts.

An analysis of those comments by the Journal found rampant cases similar to the aforementioned foul play in which the comments were not written by those who they were attributed to on the site.

Forty percent of respondents to a survey sent out by the Journal and Mercury Analytics said they did not post the comment that had their name, address, phone number, and email. A labor department spokesman responded to the Journal saying that they remove incorrect comments when they are brought to their attention and...