Analysis of comments pouring in.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: An analysis of comments regarding the White House’s proposal to allow H-4 visa holders the opportunity to work in the US for the first time ever reveals that the vast majority support the idea, but the supportive sentiments seem to be mostly repetitive and non-unique from each other.
Computer World’s Patrick Thibodeau conducted the analysis of comments in conjunction with Splunk, a company that specializes in sorting through machine-generated data in order to provide easily digestible information.
“Utilizing sentiment analysis algorithms, citizens and regulators alike can gauge the tone of public response to regulations and legislative proposals, discern issues of concern addressed in public responses, and identify primary community influencers that are mobilizing public engagement around a proposal. You can explore different agencies, proposals, volume of public comment by agency, and influencers to unearth who is influencing the debate and what people really think,” Splunk says on its website.
What the analysis found was that of the 6,650 comments posted on Regulation.gov – the official comment collection site for the US government, less than 10% were original and unique.
About 615 comments, or roughly 9%, were different from all others and were written uniquely by their respective posters. The rest of the 6,035 comments are all either partial or entire duplications of the other 615 comments, meaning that people are simply copying and pasting other peoples’ comments that they support.
This could mean several different things. Mainly, it signifies that although the vast majority of comments support giving H-4 visa holders the ability to work, most of them could just be copies of a handful of supportive original comments, which essentially makes them worthless. It also makes it difficult to decipher if the commenter supports the entirety of the comment they’ve copy/pasted, or just a portion.
But most of all, Regulations.gov will look at just the unique comments, or all of them. If it’s a simple matter of positive vs. negative comments, it seems that the measure will pass easily. But if the government looks specifically at those 615 unique comments – the total number of comments has already increased to 7,966, so the number of unique comments likely increased, too – the odds may not be so heavily stacked on one side.
Currently, comments for the H-4 proposal are being taken until July 11, meaning there are still just under three full weeks left for Americans to voice their opinions. After that, the US Department of State, along with other government agencies, will decide the fate of H-4 employment in this country.