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

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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by frojack on Saturday December 02 2017, @09:49AM (3 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Saturday December 02 2017, @09:49AM (#604183) Journal

    So you say.
    Who did the calling? You?
    How many were contacted.
    Did anyone call those in favor and do similar checks? Was that you?

    This wasn't a vote. There was nothing saying it was illegal to comment more than once on either side of the issue.

    Don't waste your time trying to count angels dancing on the head of a pin.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
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  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday December 02 2017, @11:26AM

    by Gaaark (41) on Saturday December 02 2017, @11:26AM (#604217) Journal

    I counted 5, but it WAS a very small pin.

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Saturday December 02 2017, @06:17PM

    by sjames (2882) on Saturday December 02 2017, @06:17PM (#604339) Journal

    You need to read more news. The NY AG is investigating this because he is of the opinion that it constitutes identity fraud in the state of NY.

  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday December 04 2017, @05:47PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Monday December 04 2017, @05:47PM (#605152) Journal

    This wasn't a vote. There was nothing saying it was illegal to comment more than once on either side of the issue.

    And if they had chosen to do that, there wouldn't be an issue.

    The problem is that they chose to comment more than once *while impersonating other people*.