Less than two weeks ago, it looked like the Stop Killing Games initiative was in trouble: Founder Ross Scott said the deadlines for petitions filed in the EU and UK were rapidly approaching, but both were still far from the number of signatures required to take them to the next step. The situation has changed dramatically in the brief period since, though. Scott’s warning earned attention, interest, and a pile of signatures, and both petitions have now passed their targets. But there’s a problem.
The UK petition crossed the finish line first, amassing the 100,000 signatures required to mandate a consideration for debate in Parliament. The UK government had previously responded to the petition in May, when it surpassed 10,000 signatures, essentially saying that existing laws are adequate and rejecting the petition’s demand for more stringent regulations. But that response was issued by the UK’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport, and would have no bearing on any Parliamentary action.
It’s undeniably good news, but Scott told PC Gamer had had no idea how the Parliamentary debate will ultimately turn out, and said he’s “far more optimistic about the European Citizens’ Initiative, if we can get enough signatures.” And now it has: That petition surpassed one million signatures earlier today, which essentially obligates the European Commission to examine and take some sort of action on it.
The problem is that the million signatures on the EU petition may not actually be a million signatures. There are two reasons for this: Mistakes, which are unintentional but inevitable and will be discarded, and more worryingly, a potential spoofing campaign that could be flooding the petition with fake signatures. Scott told PC Gamer that he’d been sent screenshots of spoofing campaigns from sources including 4chan and Discord: “It could just be talk, but it’s put us on more on guard,” he said.
Scott made similar claims in a new video released today, and warned people not to do it, regardless of their motivations: “First off, I want to say that this is not a Change.org petition. This is a government process. Spoofing signatures on it is a crime. Please do not do this.”
How likely it is that anyone would be prosecuted for spoofing signatures on a European Commission petition is anyone’s guess, but Scott noted that cooperation between Interpol and the FBI is pretty common, and that “Europe takes its political processes pretty seriously.” Someone chucking on one or two fake signatures may not be at much risk, but someone running a bot farm to flood it with thousands of them may be an entirely different matter.
The more immediate problem, Scott said, is that he’s “in a complete fog” about where the EU petition really stands. He thinks there are at least 600,000 legitimate signatures, maybe 700,000, but it’s also possible that a “sophisticated botnet” has inflated the number of fake signatures far beyond his estimates. Spoofed signatures won’t invalidate the campaign—legit sigs will still be counted—but the risk is that potential supporters will see the campaign has exceeded its required target and not bother adding their name to it.
It’s also a fresh, new headache for Scott. “I was looking forward to reaching a safe margin and putting this behind me,” he says in the video. “But now I guess I have to keep this up until July 31st because now there’s no such thing as a safe margin. I have no idea what’s real now.
“So for people who hate the initiative, you got me. This makes my life harder and now I’m on the hook even longer. I will be so happy for this campaign to end … You know how in World War 2, the Japanese had soldiers entrenched in a bunch of Pacific islands, except some of them never got the memo when the war ended in 1945, so they just stayed there for years, assuming the war was still on? That’s kind of where I am right now mentally.”
Scott also says in the video that he’s heard of a cryptocurrency based on Stop Killing Games, which has nothing to do with the actual campaign and is almost certainly a scam, and asked supporters to not harass PirateSoftware, aka Thor, a streamer whose been vocally critical of the Stop Killing Games campaign. Scott said whatever damage was done by his videos has been “neutralized,” adding,”If Thor and I never bother each other again, that is just fine by me.”
As for the UK petition, Scott believes its signatures are mostly legitimate, although he encouraged supporters to sign it too, to provide a safety margin. (The UK petition is currently sitting at nearly 140,000 signatures, which is a healthy buffer over the minimum.) He still has more hope for a meaningful outcome from the EU petition than the one in the UK, but takes consolation in knowing that the outcome of the UK petition cannot possibly be worse than what he’s already got: “A member of Parliament could sneeze on the petition and that would not be a worse answer.”
