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HOW WE FOUND THE FAKES

The Wall Street Journal’s methodology for investigating phony comments filed with federal agencies

By Paul Overberg and James V. Grimaldi Biography @jamesvgrimaldi Dec. 12, 2017 12:58 p.m. ET
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-we-found-the-fakes-1513101491?tesla=y

For its investigation of fake comments filed with federal agencies, The Wall Street Journal examined documents that agencies compile when making or revising regulations.?The Journal’s financial-regulatory reporters, including Yuka Hayashi, Sarah Chacko and Dave Michaels, provided suggestions for rules to review.

These “dockets” include comments by the public, which agencies must accept and review. Many agencies keep their dockets online and post some or all comments. The Journal used two key approaches:

—Text analysis. The Journal collected 10.1 million comments from dockets of several agencies. These usually included a commenter’s name and email address, the text of the comment and the date it was submitted. They also sometimes included a street address, time of submission and email-routing information.

Quid Inc., a San Francisco firm that specializes in analyzing large collections of texts, assisted the Journal in this analysis. Quid flagged batches of identical or strongly similar comments for grouped analysis.

—Direct surveys. The Journal surveyed people whose email addresses were used to file comments with these agencies. The Journal, with the assistance of Dow Jones Lead Software Engineer John Borowy, used its own email system to distribute almost 1 million survey invitations.

Mercury Analytics, a Washington-based survey research firm, assisted the Journal in designing each online survey, which used custom links to present to each respondent the exact comment attributed to that person. The survey also collected basic political, geographic and demographic information, including voter-registration status, age, race and state of residence. Mercury Analytics hosted the online survey and compiled the results.

The Journal used email and telephone calls to interview survey respondents who said they would be willing to speak with a reporter.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-we-found-the-fakes-1513101491?tesla=y