Google vs. Boilerplate Activism

ArmorFiend writes with this NYTimes article which "details the efforts of journalists to discern real reader-written letters from boilerplate form letters. Seems like there should be a centralized searchable DB of letters to the editor."

Google

[Anonymous Coward]

The story mentions Google once and only really as a secondary topic (if that), and it put in the Slashdot story title?

I'm not so sure that this is a good thing...

[Buran]

... if I write a letter to my congresscritter supporting an issue, I support that issue whether or not the original words are entirely mine. After all, presidents use speechwriters -- and this is entirely accepted as the norm (though Lincoln often wrote his own, but that's an abberation.) And yet we say that the president himself (or herself, someday in the future) supports the issue. Why should members of the public be ignored just because they have speechwriters, of a sort? It's the opinion that matters, not the form of the opinion, as long as it's not threatening or rude to another person.

Boilerplate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should a sentiment be trivialized just because the sender decided to use a statement that was prepared by another? Many people are either not verbally eloquent or lack the confidence to write in their own words. If a person agrees with what they send, shouldn't that be the determinant? We sign contracts we didn't write all the time. How is this any different?

Some interesting points from the article

[FunWithHeadlines]

I found the following two quotes of interest in the NYT article:

"Editors say some readers simply do not understand the ethical issues of sending a letter written by someone else. "They had no idea that they were bending any sort of rules whatsoever or that they were trying to put one over on us," Ms. Clotfelter said. "I e-mailed back and forth with one woman who was distressed that we wouldn't print her letter because it was really how she felt."

OK, that is how the lady felt, but it wasn't her letter. If she really felt that strongly about something, she should put her own words down. Even if a boilerplate version is thrust under her nose, write about it in her own words. I don't care how carefully crafted a letter someone else has written for you, it isn't your letter. It may express the same thoughts, but not in just the way you would express them.

"Others defend their use of form letters. "I've seen the same thing from the other side," said Trevor D. Carlson, who signed one of the pro-Bush form letters to The Press Democrat."

ROFL! Oh, so then it's OK. After all, we all know that if the other side does it it must be OK to do it too.

Moral thinking? Perish the thought!

-------

More impact.

[www.sorehands.com]

Go into your representitives' office and talk with them in person. Go and testify at public hearings.

When they have hundreds of people showing up at their office, they can't hit the delete key.

Re:I'm not so sure that this is a good thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue isn't about sending email to support a cause, but specifically letters to the editor of a newspaper. Newspapers excercise editorial control over the letters they choose to print, and wish only to print the original work of the author. "AstroTurf"ing involves passing off the work of another as your own, violating this guideline.

Re:I'm not so sure that this is a good thing...

[jguevin]

You'll note in the article that one thing editors are concerned about is actually _printing_ these form letters. They're not taking polls, they're actually publishing content, and there's something at least vaguely dishonest about sending a "letter to the editor" that you didn't write.

Re:I'm not so sure that this is a good thing...

[radio_jed]

A lot of organizations love to get drones to mail the same letter to the same person, so that it appears that the letter is coming from a different address and the senator/editor/whatever might actually open it. I see the point, then, in making sure that time is not wasted opening these. However, on the flipside, sure, it is the opinion that counts. And he who speaks the loudest wins, right? There's two different ballgames being played here.

It's dishonest

[fleener]

Buran, "Letters to the editor" are intended and presumed to be the genuine thoughts of the letter writer. A form letter may convey your feelings, but it's not your letter, and so it's not genuine. We expect people to sign their name to their own words.

Given the example in the news article, sign the letter "Republican National Committee, ditto'd by Buran." That we you stay honest and everyone knows the true nature and history of the letter.

More importantly, if you can't take five minutes to put your own thoughts into a letter, how passionately can you really be about a given issue? Authentic (original) letter writing creates a natural weeding process that pushes less important issues into the background and that is a good thing. Mass-produced letters create an artificial and false impression that issues are more strongly felt and realized in society than they really are. It brings politics, money and marketing campaigns to the newspaper opinion page, where they don't belong -- unless opinions by such forces are honestly divulged.

Re:Boilerplate?

[teamhasnoi]

Dear /.,

Why should a sentiment be trivialized just because the sender decided to use a statement that was prepared by another? Many people are either not verbally eloquent or lack the confidence to write in their own words. If a person agrees with what they send, shouldn't that be the determinant? We sign contracts we didn't write all the time. How is this any different?

Signed, teamhasnoi

PS. This is why. It's lame. I want to hear the words of the person sending the letter - I can then determine if they actually know what they are taliking about, if they have a personal stake in the issue, if they have even done any research - or if they are another monkey banging on a Brother Word Processor. If you can't take the time to form your own words about something you believe in enough to send a letter/email about, how can I be sure that the issue and the reasons and situations behind it are fixed in your mind?

Why doesn't the NYT hook up with the same people who are checking term papers and thesis papers for cheating - IIRC, they had a database of every paper that anyone ever turned in - it then checked new papers against the DB to see if there were matching word patterns or entire paragraphs lifted. The link escapes me, but it was posted here last year sometime...

Re:I'm not so sure that this is a good thing...

[jd142]

But if you use exactly the same language, then the person on the other end doesn't know whether 15 people sent the same letter or 1 person sent the letter 15 times. No one reads the return address and postmark on the letters.

Plus, if I see that all you did was grab the generic text, then I might think that your commitment is pretty shallow.

Re:I'm not so sure that this is a good thing...

[FunWithHeadlines]

"Why should members of the public be ignored just because they have speechwriters, of a sort?"

For the same reason we don't allow students to hand in boilerplate exam papers just because they agree with everything in the boilerplate: You want to see what the student actually knows and thinks.

So too in this situation. If you get a letter to the editor written by the speechwriter, how can you know if that really expresses the opinion of the person emailing it? It could be that the person doesn't really agree, but was sent it by an organization he or she trusts and just passed it on to cooperate.

Depends on the recipient

[Ovidius]

I think there's a difference between letters to the editor and other kinds of communication mentioned in the article, such as letters to congressional representatives. When you send a letter to your representative or senator, you're really just voting, in a way. I don't think they really read them -- they just tabulate for and against on specific issues. The fact that the internet makes it easier for people to participate in this kind of democracy is great (as long as people read the letters they sign). Amnesty International has a program called Freedom Writers [amnestyusa.org] which is very similar, and I don't think anyone would want a dictator to ignore a landslide of letters in support of a political prisoner, just because it was obvious astroturfing by Amnesty International

But letters to the editor are treated as if they come from individuals. So, while encouraging people to write to their newspapers is one thing, encouraging them to write this to their newspaper, because the audience of these letters is partly the editors but also partly the general public, seems much more like the creation of propaganda -- like hiring actors to say something everywhere everyday until people believe it's true because they keep hearing it. Insofar as editors are paying attention to public opinion they should take these letters into account, but their job is, I hope, to be more thoughtful than that.

Re:I'm not so sure that this is a good thing...

[charvolant]

There's a minimum thought requirement, particularly for newspaper letters pages.

Actually writing your own letter indicates that you have, however minimally, thought about the issues. Form letters simply encourage knee-jeck reactions.

The form letter producers want knee-jerks, of course. If you actually wrote your own letter, you would start thinking about evidence, details, problems and shades of grey. And before you know it, you're arguing over what policy is appropriate, thinking as an individual and removing the illusion of a united front. Activists of any stripe just hate that.

What delivers more impact to a politician?

[Anonymous Coward]

Twenty people submitting original essays, or twenty-thousand people sending the same message?

What this article really covers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Boilerplate activism, if it is signed in earnest, is a step up from what 98% of Americans do, particularly on issues that do not directly involve their pocketbooks (whether through costs incurred or taxes) - which is no activism at all. At least boilerplate activism, when its sign-ees are checked, is a voicing of opinion.

Try and explain to your mom how important copyright length limitation is to the freedom of ideas. Done? Now, expect her to write the San Francisco Chronicle or her congressman, with an original interpretation of what you just said.

Has your head exploded yet?

Perhaps it would be more reasonable, if we're going to see boilerplate activism, to have a given form letter signed by people who agree with its content, assuming their addresses and names are truthful (and that can be checked).

Consider two scenarios:

1. 5 people who go to great effort to explain themselves write their congressman or local paper about issue X.

2. 10,000 people all sign on to a common belief platform/letter, and that is sent to a local paper or congressman.

The five who send in original letters will make more unique points and may illustrate ideas that the media or congress hasn't thought of. 10,000 signatures in a district, however, hits a hell of a lot closer to home in a war of numbers and votes.

Don't discount the form letter unless you're willing to write every thought you feel the world should understand, uniquely, AND expect all of the people you know to do the same. They have jobs, kids, and a life too...

Re:Silly

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, if public servants had their incoming mail reduced by 97%, perhaps they'd have time to read and give weight to the letters that people actually do write, rather than having some office worker reduce it to a tick in the "supports" or "doesn't support" column.

Folks, we all learned (or should have learned) in Economics 101 that scarcity leads to value. I'm sure that deluging a public servant with mailbags was a good way to make a point once upon a time, but now that everyone on either side of an issue does it regularly, those same public servants have grown accustomed to it and the impact is no longer as great.

Re:Silly

[Otter]

First of all, while others have pointed this out, it seems to require repeating: the article is concerned with letters to the editor. Newspapers and magazines want to publish original writing, not to reprint form letters with some reader's name pasted in at the bottom.

Regarding form letters to legislators or corporations, which is what you seem to have in mind, they have an impact proportional to the effort they represent. They carry more weigh than nothing, but less than a message in the writer's own words, precisely because they're " tremendously easy" to send.

Re:I'm not so sure that this is a good thing...

[SysPig]

... if I write a letter to my congresscritter supporting an issue, I support that issue whether or not the original words are entirely mine. After all, presidents use speechwriters -- and this is entirely accepted as the norm (though Lincoln often wrote his own, but that's an abberation.) And yet we say that the president himself (or herself, someday in the future) supports the issue. Why should members of the public be ignored just because they have speechwriters, of a sort? It's the opinion that matters, not the form of the opinion, as long as it's not threatening or rude to another person.

Re:Silly

[deanj]

Boilerplate activism is completely pointless. It does the typical and ineffective thing: it makes the person signing it feel good, so they can get on with their life without actually doing anything about it. Say your against something, and you can act any way you want. I've seen it over and over.

If people would actually take part in what they believe in, and tell it in their own words, it has a helluva lot more impact that some form letter.

Thank goodness this is the way most activism is done these days. Keep it up, and we'll keep ignoring it.

Simulated political thought abounds

[hiendohar]

As more political campaign material moves online, it might be interesting to apply a similar process and analyze candidates' speeches and promotional materials with an eye to uncovering how much stump speech is original. A lot of candidates make only modest efforts to repackage what is, in effect, a centrally distributed message: the party line. This is less crude than the cut-and-paste activism decried in the article, but it bears comparison. Since pattern recognition techniques can smack down commercial robots, why not sic them on the political automatons as well?

Re:Boilerplate?

[zabieru]

Because it's a newspaper. Send all the boilerplate you want to your senator, or the President, or a company. They care. But a reader of a letters page doesn't want to know what Planned Parenthood or the RNC think, if they did they'd just go read the articles about those organizations.

Re:Silly

[dillon_rinker]

so the gist of your argument is "All of you shut up so that my representative can hear what I say."

Re:How about using it against journalists?

[jcast]

Considering we're commenting on an article about Journalists complaining about the opinions of activists masquerading as grassroot opinions in the letters to the editor, I think a comment about an activist masquerading as grassroot is on topic.

Two kinds of "Astroturf" getting confused here...

[EnlightenmentFan]

All form letters are not created equal. Suppose Group A and Group B both hate snowmobiles. Both groups pay somebody to write a letter blasting snowmobiles, and post it on their website. 500 members of each group click "Submit" to sign the letter and send it.

"Informative astroturf": Group A's form sends 500 emails to a Congressional committee. This is like sending a petition with 500 signatures. It is not meant to trick the committee in any way--just to show the level of suppport.

"Deceptive Astroturf": Group B's form sends 500 signed emails to 500 different local papers as "Letters to the Editor." This is meant to trick the paper into giving free space instead of paying for ad space. It is meant to trick readers into thinking somebody from a local town wrote the letter--that's what propagandists call the "Plain Folks" trick.

Nobody is saying that the Republicans are the first group, or the only group, to try deceptive astroturf. But I think big, well-funded groups should be held to a higher standard than this. If nothing else, they could afford to pay those little papers for the space to air their views.

Re:Boilerplate?

[ApharmdB]

Ah, but no matter how personal a letter you send to your Congresscritter, you get a form letter back if you get anything. Give them deep, well-thought out ideas and they return something that sounds an awful lot like a campaign speech.

As they are not likely to do anything other than say "This one is for", "This one against" doesn't it make sense to make it as easy as possible to get as many letters to them in support of your group's position?

Not that this really matters. If organization's want to really influence Congressmembers, they need to make it as easy to donate a few bucks to a Congresscritter's name in support of some issue/organization as possible. Webcomics with tiny readerships (relative to the number of people concerned about various political issues) seem to rake in the dough with paypal accounts. What if all the e-mail boilerplate letter pages had donation buttons on them too? "Dear Senator, this donation to your re-election campaign comes from the XYZ group. We sure like you. We hope you like us." *nudge* *nudge*

Yes, I'm advocating bribery. It's not like that isn't how it already works. (Bitter? Me? Nah.)