Claire Ryan

Okay so this is from my experience as a senior web dev who specializes in data processing and analysis. I also did some anti-fraud work in online advertising back in the day

So I've seen some people enter reports for Ted Cruz or whoever and the important thing to know here is that this will not poison the dataset. The dataset becomes worthless when the owner can't tell the difference between good and bad data.

If I'm handed a dataset for which I know some amount of data is junk, the first thing I do is look for consistent, identifiable patterns. I look for something I can pick out that will let me filter out the junk.

Way back when, I was tasked with nailing down a batch of possibly fraudulent conversions out of one platform which my company was running an online marketing campaign out of. All I had were the IP logs, more or less

IP logs with thousands of real conversions mixed in with fake ones, mind you. These guys thought they were being smart by shuffling their IPs. They were not smart enough about it though.

They ran the scripts for the fake conversions over a VPN. As soon as I found one of them, I wrote a parser that started to analyse the incoming IPs and identify any blocks that could be attributed to a VPN.

I could only do this because the VPN didn't shuffle IPs fast enough, and it reused IPs between conversions in a timeframe that would be impossible for a human. It took a while, but eventually I filtered out about $20k worth of junk.

That was handed back to the platform along with a demand for a refund, btw, which they promptly gave us and then they groveled to keep our business. Anyway - that is the level you have to beat, if there is someone competent in the back end.

Now, the Tulsa rally thing was a perfect example of data being inconsistent and unidentifiable. Get enough people using random names, from a residential IP, making plausible reports, and you can't ID the real data in the noise.

Point being: you HAVE to make the junk look exactly like the real data, as far as is possible. Use the name of Ted Cruz or whoever and they'll just filter out those records.

TBH they may also have the chops to filter out VPN traffic but I'd say have a go anyway in case they don't. These idiots probably setup this site because they want to claim the bounty of $10k, holy fucking shit, for reporting women who have abortions.

But I'd guess there is some significant work involved in following up on these reports. What you need to do is waste enough of their time with junk reports until it's no longer viable to go after the bounties for the real ones.

And here's the thing: we've got tools to mitigate DDOS, to protect against hacking, all that tech jazz. We cannot protect against bad data. We can't know the intent of the person at the computer.