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More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked

posted by martyb on Saturday December 02 2017, @09:06AM   
from the say-it-often-enough-and-people-will-tend-to-believe-you dept.

Fnord666 writes in with a story from hackernoon:

I used natural language processing techniques to analyze net neutrality comments submitted to the FCC from April-October 2017, and the results were disturbing.

NY Attorney General Schneiderman estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans' identities were stolen and used in spam campaigns that support repealing net neutrality. My research found at least 1.3 million fake pro-repeal comments, with suspicions about many more. In fact, the sum of fake pro-repeal comments in the proceeding may number in the millions. In this post, I will point out one particularly egregious spambot submission, make the case that there are likely many more pro-repeal spambots yet to be confirmed, and estimate the public position on net neutrality in the "organic" public submissions.

The author's key findings:

1. One pro-repeal spam campaign used mail-merge to disguise 1.3 million comments as unique grassroots submissions.
2. There were likely multiple other campaigns aimed at injecting what may total several million pro-repeal comments into the system.
3. It's highly likely that more than 99% of the truly unique comments³ were in favor of keeping net neutrality.

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Original Submission

• Re:Or.... Re:Or.... (Score: 5, Informative) by NotSanguine on Saturday December 02 2017, @09:34AM (1 child)

  by NotSanguine (285) <{NotSanguine} {at} {SoylentNews.Org}> on Saturday December 02 2017, @09:34AM (#604176) Homepage Journal

  Perhaps someone with significant media reach provided a template for interested people to use, since the overwhelming majority of people seem to dislike writing letters these days.

  There have been numerous (aside from this guy's analysis) analyses which clearly show the use of spambots to send these messages. What's more many of these analyses actually contacted the purported posters of these automated comments and found out that most didn't even know what net neutrality was and didn't post any comments at all.

  I'm not going to do the work for you. You can find them yourself in seconds with a quick search.

  If you're unwilling to do so, you're either being deliberately obtuse, are a shill for the ISPs or just plain dumb.

  --
  No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
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  Interesting=1, Informative=2, Total=3
  Extra 'Informative' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
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• Re:Or.... (Score: -1, Flamebait) by frojack on Saturday December 02 2017, @09:50AM

  by frojack (1554) on Saturday December 02 2017, @09:50AM (#604184) Journal

  I would say that was probably true on BOTH sides.

  --
  No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.

  Parent