I don't think this article adds anything to the discussion. It repeats Halderman's earlier point.
the important point is that all elections should be audited, and not only if you have statistics suggesting that something might be fishy.
And repeats other conclusions which say that there are no signs of something fishy in the currently available data, at least based on initial statistical analyses.
People in Western nations might want to remember that Iran was an ally of the U.S. and I think other Western states before the 1979 revolution.
I'm not sure why the Western countries would prefer Saudi Arabia over Iran at this point, except that Saudi Arabia is more willing to work with the West. Both promote extremist ideologies.
Iran is supporting Assad's mass killing of people in Syria, but I think that in the long run they are no different than the Saudis (and many in the West) in this respect; the Saudis would do the same if one of their major allies was at risk.
In order to make this claim, Amazon, TechCrunch, and the researcher they cite must be able to accurately identify the population of incentivized reviews. How is that possible?
Incentivized reviews, if I'm using the term correctly, are designed to be indistinguishable from 'real' reviews. The reviewers aren't going to reveal which ones are incentivized.
If you think you can identify them, what you mean is that you can identify the ones that you identify; it's literally that much of a tautology. You have no idea of your accuracy, how many true and false positives and how many true/false negatives.
What Amazon is done is the same; they remove reviews that meet certain criteria. Amazon claims the criteria are an accurate proxy for incentivized reviews but I doubt they can confirm that.
At best they are raising the bar so that only better written incentivized reviews remain, and incentivized reviewers will adjust to the new standard. Users, no longer seeing incentivized reviews that they can identify, will assume the situation has improved. Really, they are still being conned but now don't know it.
the important point is that all elections should be audited, and not only if you have statistics suggesting that something might be fishy.
And repeats other conclusions which say that there are no signs of something fishy in the currently available data, at least based on initial statistical analyses.