False texts by Beto O. Rourke expose a new playground for trolls

A screen capture of the suspicious text message began circulating social media on Wednesday.

"Hi, it's Patsy here with Beto for Texas." Our records indicate that you are a supporter, "the text message read, supposedly from a volunteer for the Beto O 'Hope Rourke Hope Campaign of the Texas Senate. "We are looking for volunteers to help transport undocumented people to polling stations so that they can vote, would you be able to support this local effort?"

The text comes from a service called Relay, which O'Rourke volunteers use to contact potential voters. But the message itself – promoting open election fraud – was not sanctioned by the campaign. "He was sent by an imposter," O'Rourke's director of communications, Chris Evans, said in a statement. Ted Cruz's opposition campaign said that they had nothing to do either. In the day, Relay closed the account behind the phony solicitation.

The hoax was short-lived, and Relay's CEO, Daniel Souweine, says WIRED is "a total value" among the millions of texts that have been sent via the platform this cycle. And yet, the entire trial reveals a new battlefield widely discussed in the information war that is unfolding on almost every digital front.

Ironically, the text began circulating online just as Facebook and Twitter leaders appeared in front of Congress, exposing their plans to prevent trolls and propagandists from using their platforms to spread misinformation. They talked about using artificial intelligence and legions of human moderators to eliminate bad behavior, while lawmakers promised regulation to keep companies accountable.

Meanwhile, an increasing number of campaigns and political groups rely on writing tools that have virtually no railings. They allow any campaign volunteer to access a list of phone numbers and send the message of their choice. Because volunteers send each message individually and have the freedom to change what everyone says, these so-called peer-to-peer texts bypass the regulatory restrictions that the Federal Communications Commission grants to robotsexts. In the 2016 elections, the two campaigns Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders demonstrated the effectiveness of the approach, which led to a surge of activity in the run-up to mid-term elections. course this fall.

Despite their sudden growth, these young companies have not been able to prepare for the type of manipulation that has hit other larger technology platforms. Instead, they leave it to the countryside to carefully control their volunteers, as they would with a banker or solicitor in person.

"The more obstacles you have at the entrance, the less likely the trolls are to cross," says Souweine, who founded Relay after running Sanders' national texting program in 2016.

He discovered the fake text O & Rourke like most people: on Twitter. The relay quickly closed the account, but Souweine refused to share the details about the attacker, saying it was in the campaign to investigate the person and how much damage they had done. According to Evans, "not a lot of messages" were sent, but the communications director refused to provide a specific number and did not respond to repeated requests for comments on volunteer text monitoring.

All it takes to register as a textist at O ​​& # 39; Rourke, is to fill out a form on his web page. You will then receive an email with instructions for setting up a Slack and Relay account and a link to a site where you can sign up for a shift. The e-mail is accompanied by educational videos on YouTube, which explain how everything works. The volunteers connect to the Relay, where the campaign sends them a preloaded script and a list of people to contact. It takes about 30 minutes to click on the sending of each text, and the volunteers are free to edit the message as they hear it. About 10 to 15 percent of voters respond, according to the video, and when they do, the campaign offers a list of scripted answers on, for example, where voters can get a control panel. Once the texts are sent, the campaigns can check for any irregularities. But in the case of the text O & # 39; Rourke, the harm was already done.

Souweine points out that what happened to O 'Rourke's campaign is incredibly rare. "There are few times where this has become a problem, you do not build software for extreme cases," he says.

Practitioners in the field argue that what happened to O & # Rourke is the risk you take when you use volunteers to spread your message, regardless of the medium. "Everyone can take a smell test, become a spokesperson for a campaign and say something crazy," says Gerrit Lansing, former chief digital officer of the Republican National Committee who co-founded the peer-to-peer company. -peer Opn Sesame. At least, the texts leave a digital trace, he adds.

That's true, but the textators also work on a much larger scale than the average door hammer. The O & # 39; Rourke campaign training videos indicate that texturers usually contact 500 to 800 potential voters over a 30-minute period. In the time needed to detect a problematic message, hundreds or thousands of people could have been misled. And in a tight race like O 'Rourke's, that matters.

Some platforms have developed tools to alert their customers after anomalies. Campaigns and left-wing organizations have used a tool called Hustle to send and receive 17.5 million political messages this year alone. Hustle uses automated triggers that allow its staff to know if, for example, a given message causes an unusually large number of people to unsubscribe text messages. "Our successful customer managers would investigate in real time," says Roddy Lindsay, CEO of Hustle. Yet even this backup comes after the fact.

These risks have recently been addressed by Sangeeth Peruri, CEO of another texting company called VoterCircle. Unlike Hustle, Relay or Opn Sesame, VoterCircle is a friend-to-friend service, which means volunteers download their own contact lists first to see which of their friends a particular campaign could want to reach. Then they are free to contact them by e-mail or SMS. This tool was used to send hundreds of thousands of messages during Virginia governor elections and Alabama special elections, among other key races.

During the race in Virginia, Peruri said he feared that some of the neo-Nazis who gathered in Charlottesville a few months ago are trying to co-opt the message of the Democrats. Thus, VoterCircle has set up an approval system on its email service: whenever someone changed the given script, the campaign had to agree before it was released. Although campaigns have the option to disable this option, VoterCircle has made it the default setting, which means most have left it in place. "We have never seen any harmful activity, but we were protected," said Peruri. In a few cases, he said, it helped the campaigns to better understand the type of message their volunteers thought was most useful.

For the moment, peer texting is still a regulatory gray area. Although the FCC has strict rules regarding automated calls and texts, it has not tried to curb this new category of business. The industry hopes that stays that way. Earlier this year, a lobby group called P2P Alliance, of which Opn Sesame is a member, has issued a petition asking the FCC to clarify that peer-to-peer texting is exempt from consumer protection law regulation. SMS.

In the absence of federal guidelines, it is up to companies and campaigns themselves to prevent the sending of misleading messages on their behalf. Fortunately for O 'Rourke, the message sent by the rogue texting was sufficiently scandalous to be easily dismissed as a troll. But what happens if a badly informed actor changes the message in a way that the average voter might believe? And if they were not the only ones? At the present time, it is not at all clear that these platforms would be ready to do a lot to fix it. Of course, this text can be an aberration today. But sometimes, an aberration is only a warning sign.

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