AI and Astroturf

Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier

This month, the New York state attorney general issued a report on a scheme by “U.S. Companies and Partisans [to] Hack Democracy.” This wasn’t another attempt by Republicans to make it harder for Black people and urban residents to vote. It was a concerted attack on another core element of U.S. democracy — the ability of citizens to express their voice to their political representatives. And it was carried out by generating millions of fake comments and fake emails purporting to come from real citizens.

This attack was detected because it was relatively crude. But artificial intelligence technologies are making it possible to generate genuine-seeming comments at scale, drowning out the voices of real citizens in a tidal wave of fake ones.

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The big telecommunications companies paid millions of dollars to specialist “AstroTurf” companies to generate public comments. These companies then stole people’s names and email addresses from old files and from hacked data dumps and attached them to 8.5 million public comments and half a million letters to members of Congress. All of them said that they supported the corporations’ position on something called “net neutrality,” the idea that telecommunications companies must treat all Internet content equally and not prioritize any company or service. Three AstroTurf companies — Fluent, Opt-Intelligence and React2Media — agreed to pay nearly $4 million in fines.

The fakes were crude. Many of them were identical, while others were patchworks of simple textual variations: substituting “Federal Communications Commission” and “FCC” for each other, for example.

Next time, though, we won’t be so lucky. New technologies are about to make it far easier to generate enormous numbers of convincing personalized comments and letters, each with its own word choices, expressive style and pithy examples. The people who create fake grass-roots organizations have always been enthusiastic early adopters of technology, weaponizing letters, faxes, emails and Web comments to manufacture the appearance of public support or public outrage.

Fake Comments and Federal Agencies

 James V. Grimaldi at WSJ:

Senate investigators found that federal agencies do little or nothing to stop crimes and abuses committed in the systems they use to collect public comments on proposed regulations.

A new bipartisan report, issued Thursday, said the agencies haven’t acted in even the most egregious cases, where real people’s identities, including dead people’s, are stolen and then submitted with comments they never wrote.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report comes after The Wall Street Journal in 2017 exposed thousands of other fraudulent comments on regulatory dockets at federal agencies, some using what appear to be stolen identities posted by computers programmed to pile comments onto the dockets.

Findings of Fact:

Most federal agencies lack appropriate processes to address allegations that people have submitted comments under fraudulent identities. Recent reports demonstrate that individuals are using false identities to submit comments. Agencies, however, lack both the ability to determine if people submit comments under valid identities and appropriate processes to address allegations that fraud or identity theft has occurred. Only one agency contacted by the Subcommittee—the CFTC—said that it had referred suspicious activity to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”). Other agencies, including the CFPB, the Department of Labor, and the FCC, all were aware of comments submitted under false identities regarding their rules, but took little action to address them.

The FCC’s process for addressing comments submitted under false identities potentially causes additional harm to victims of identity theft and the comment process as a whole. The only remedy the FCC provides to people who allege that their identities have been used to post a comment they did not authorize is for the identity theft victims to post a separate comment to establish their own position on an issue. This adds even more comments to often lengthy dockets, making them less useful to the public and to FCC staff. It also requires the victims to engage in a regulatory process in which they potentially have no interest in engaging.

None of the commenting systems use CAPTCHA or other technology to ensure that real people, instead of bots, are submitting comments to rulemaking dockets. This leaves thecommenting process more vulnerable to abuse by malicious actors.

"Free and Fair Markets" Astroturf

James V. Grimaldi at WSJ:

About 18 months ago a new nonprofit group called Free and Fair Markets Initiative launched a national campaign criticizing the business practices of one powerful company: Amazon.com Inc.

Free and Fair Markets accused Amazon of stifling competition and innovation, inhibiting consumer choice, gorging on government subsidies, endangering its warehouse workers and exposing consumer data to privacy breaches. It claimed to have grass-roots support from average citizens across the U.S, citing a labor union, a Boston management professor and a California businessman.

What the group did not say is that it received backing from some of Amazon’s chief corporate rivals. They include shopping mall owner Simon Property Group Inc., retailer Walmart Inc. and software giant Oracle Corp. , according to people involved with and briefed on the project. Simon Property is fighting to keep shoppers who now prefer to buy what they need on Amazon; Walmart is competing with Amazon over retail sales; and Oracle is battling Amazon over a $10 billion Pentagon cloud-computing contract.

The grass-roots support cited by the group was also not what it appeared to be. The labor union says it was listed as a member of the group without permission and says a document purporting to show that it gave permission has a forged signature. The Boston professor says the group, with his permission, ghost-wrote an op-ed for him about Amazon but that he didn’t know he would be named as a member. The California businessman was dead for months before his name was removed from the group’s website this year.

Crowds on Demand

James Rufus Koren at the Los Angeles Times:

Paid protesters are a real thing.

Crowds on Demand, a Beverly Hills firm that’s an outspoken player in the business of hiring protesters, boasts on its website that it provides its clients with “protests, rallies, flash-mobs, paparazzi events and other inventive PR stunts.… We provide everything including the people, the materials and even the ideas.”

The company has hired actors to lobby the New Orleans City Council on behalf of a power plant operator, protest a Masons convention in San Francisco and act like supportive fans and paparazzi at an L.A. conference for life coaches.

But according to a lawsuit filed by a Czech investor, Crowds on Demand also takes on more sordid assignments. Zdenek Bakala claims the firm has been used to run an extortion campaign against him.

Bakala has accused Prague investment manager Pavol Krupa of hiring Crowds on Demand to pay protesters to march near his home in Hilton Head, S.C., and to call and send emails to the Aspen Institute and Dartmouth College, where Bakala serves on advisory boards, urging them to cut ties to him. Bakala alleges that Krupa has threatened to continue and expand the campaign unless Bakala pays him $23 million.

COMPANY WEBSITE 

A video from the Sac Bee:

Fake Comments

At The Wall Street Journal, James V. Grimaldi reports that the attorney general of New York State has subpoenaed more than a dozen consultants and outside lobbying firms as part of an investigation into fake comments filed with the FCC over net neutrality.

The civil subpoenas are aimed at determining who was behind millions of comments sent using the names of real people who didn’t authorize them, according to a person familiar with the investigation. New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood said in a statement that her office found up to 9.5 million comments that appear to have been filed using the names and addresses of real people who had no idea they were being cited in the comments.

An investigation by The Wall Street Journal last year found thousands of people who said their names were used without their permission to post comments about FCC rules.

The attorney general’s yearlong investigation is targeting fake comments filed on both sides of the issue. Among the entities subpoenaed are Broadband for America, a group backed by AT&T Inc. and other internet-service providers who sought the repeal of the Obama-era internet rules known as net neutrality, as well as consumer groups that supported the Obama rules, such as Fight for the Future and Free Press.

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The attorney general also subpoenaed the Center for Individual Freedom, an Alexandria, Va.-based group that supported Mr. Pai’s repeal of the rules and drafted one of the most frequently cited comments posted on the FCC website: a complaint about the “unprecedented regulatory power the Obama administration.”

The Journal investigation reached 1,994 of the people registered by the FCC as having filed that comment; 72% of them said the comment was falsely submitted.

Transfer Calls and Other Mobilization Techniques

Tony Mecia and Haley Bird at The Weekly Standard

By nearly all accounts, calls to Congress have risen since the 2016 election, as they often do in the initial years of a new presidency. Yet many of those calls are not merely organic expressions of a newly energized electorate. Rather, they are being engineered by interest groups. The practice, little-known outside of the Capitol, is known as “transfer calling” or “patch-through calling.” It involves specialized firms placing telemarketing calls in search of people who agree with their clients’ causes. When they find one, they connect that person to his or her representative to express what is meant to sound like an authentic and firmly held opinion.

One example from the Center for Individual Freedom:

 “Are you willing to call Rep. Hudson and urge him to support a law to protect consumers online?” she asks on a recording of the phone call. “If you are, I can patch this call through, and you can leave a message with his office and let them know you support a consumer bill of rights to protect your online usage.”

And that's not all...

Transfer calling is just one tactic groups use to apply pressure to legislators. Other strategies include forming issue-oriented front groups to drum up citizen interest, commissioning public-opinion polls, scripting op-eds or letters to the editor of local papers, and encouraging followers to weigh in on social media and with texts and emails. Phone calls can be more effective at influencing legislators, though, because it is harder to judge the authenticity of messages originating from newer technological platforms. In one well-publicized example, when the Federal Communications Commission last year solicited comments on its proposal to undo net-neutrality rules, it received millions of comments that were later determined to be either form letters or bot-written messages.

“There has been a long-term increase in efforts to gin up political mobilization,” says Matt Grossmann, a political science professor at Michigan State University who studies interest groups and influence. “The firms that do it are a little bit secretive, but there is enough in the public domain to show that there are firms that do this full-time that you can hire to try to stimulate grassroots support for your cause.”

Brobilizing

Caroline O'Donovan at Buzzfeed:

Unlike the neighborhood bakery that wants customers to add their names and addresses to a petition for expanded outdoor seating, tech companies typically already know who and where their users are. It means startups can mobilize — or brobilize — thousands of people via a simple email or push notification to blast targeted messages to their elected officials, often with just a few clicks. It’s like astroturfing for the always-on, location-aware era.

Bird — which has also tried to brobilize customers in Milwaukee, Culver City, and Boston— did not invent this method of getting startup customers to help fight regulation. Uber texted its customers in Texas when the city of Austin was trying to force drivers to undergo more stringent background checks. Airbnb has done it in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, where hosts participating in a political campaign called Airbnb Citizen have lobbied legislators by phone, in the street, and in public hearings. Just this week, delivery company DoorDash set up a website where its delivery workers can ask California lawmakers to override a court decision that would make it harder to continue classifying those workers as independent contractors.

These click-to-lobby efforts have been ramping up for a few years now as elected officials get more serious about regulating tech (or more cognizant of the political value of appearing to do so) and startups increasingly ask their user bases to defend them in response.

Grassroots, Astroturf, and Speed Cameras

In our chapter on interest groups (p. 289), we talk about "astroturf" -- "grassroots" activism that has support from professionals. In our chapters on mass media and political participation, we also discuss ways in which activists are using blogs and social media. A story in the Lutherville-Timonium Patch illustrates both themes:

Sarah Dennis started the Facebook group "Slow Down for Baltimore County Schools" in January because she and her friends support more speed cameras in school zones.

"I just figured I'd put it up on the web," said Dennis, a Rodgers Forge mother of two and a special education teacher for Baltimore County Public Schools.

The group quickly attracted 357 “likes” from people who support a County Council bill that, if approved Monday, will authorize an unlimited expansion of the county’s current network of 15 speed cameras.

But the grassroots effort to win council support has a powerful friend not found on its Facebook page: ACS State and Local Solutions, the company that holds the county’s speed camera contract and stands to financially benefit from the pending legislation.

Kearney O’Doherty (KO) Public Affairs, the politically connected strategy firm hired by ACS, has helped Slow Down for Baltimore County Schools communicate with County Council members and expand its base of support by establishing a separate website that sends e-mails to the elected officials and drives more “likes” to the Facebook page.

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Unlike with disclosure rules for lobbying groups, nothing prohibits political strategy firms from working behind the scenes to align the interests of grassroots groups with those of their corporate clients.

But political observers say public awareness of such activity is important so that elected officials and citizens know when a company with a financial interest in pending legislation is backing a grassroots group with a public interest in the bill.

“It’s information people should know,” said Paul Herrnson, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for American Politics and Citizenship and a professor of government and politics. “It’s not unusual for a company to try to get its way.”

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In Maryland, groups like the Maryland Jockey Club and Penn National have financed anti-slots community groups — not because the companies were against expanded gaming, but because they wanted to influence where the machines were placed, said Matthew Crenson, chairman emeritus of Johns Hopkins University’s political science department.

The practice of companies helping grassroots groups "is so common they have a name for it — 'Astroturf democracy'"—as opposed to “grassroots,” said Crenson, who did not comment specifically on Kearney O'Doherty Public Affairs’ involvement in the speed camera issue.

"For every public group there is a private or corporate organization that has an interest in their efforts," Crenson said. "In a way, it's good. Small public groups get access to consulting and support services they might not otherwise have. They're getting access to the political system that they wouldn't have had otherwise."