In the early hours of Feb. 7, China’s powerful internet censors experienced an unfamiliar and deeply unsettling sensation. They felt they were losing control.
The news was spreading quickly that Li Wenliang, a doctor who had warned about a strange new viral outbreak only to be threatened by the police and accused of peddling rumors, had died of COVID-19. Grief and fury coursed through social media. To people at home and abroad, Li’s death showed the terrible cost of the Chinese government’s instinct to suppress inconvenient information.
Yet China’s censors decided to double down. Warning of the “unprecedented challenge” Li’s passing had posed and the “butterfly effect” it may have set off, officials got to work suppressing the inconvenient news and reclaiming the narrative, according to confidential directives sent to local propaganda workers and news outlets.
They ordered news websites not to issue push notifications alerting readers to his death. They told social platforms to gradually remove his name from trending topics pages. And they activated legions of fake online commenters to flood social sites with distracting chatter, stressing the need for discretion: “As commenters fight to guide public opinion, they must conceal their identity, avoid crude patriotism and sarcastic praise, and be sleek and silent in achieving results.”
Special instructions were issued to manage anger over Dr. Li’s death.
The orders were among thousands of secret government directives and other documents that were reviewed by The New York Times and ProPublica. They lay bare in extraordinary detail the systems that helped the Chinese authorities shape online opinion during the pandemic.
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More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked
November 25, 2017
More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked
I used natural language processing techniques to analyze net neutrality comments submitted to the FCC from April-October 2017, and the results were disturbing.
NY Attorney General Schneiderman estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans’ identities were stolen and used in spam campaigns that support repealing net neutrality. My research found at least 1.3 million fake pro-repeal comments, with suspicions about many more. In fact, the sum of fake pro-repeal comments in the proceeding may number in the millions. In this post, I will point out one particularly egregious spambot submission, make the case that there are likely many more pro-repeal spambots yet to be confirmed, and estimate the public position on net neutrality in the “organic” public submissions.¹
Key Findings:²
Breaking Down the Submissions
Given the well documented irregularities throughout the comment submission process, it was clear from the start that the data was going to be duplicative and messy. If I wanted to do the analysis without having to set up the tools and infrastructure typically used for “big data,” I needed to break down the 22M+ comments and 60GB+ worth of text data and metadata into smaller pieces.⁴
Thus, I tallied up the many duplicate comments⁵ and arrived at 2,955,182 unique comments and their respective duplicate counts. I then mapped each comment into semantic space vectors⁶ and ran some clustering algorithms on the meaning of the comments.⁷ This method identified nearly 150 clusters of comment submission texts of various sizes.⁸
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