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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   Printer-friendly
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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Saturday December 02 2017, @10:09AM

    by NotSanguine (285) <{NotSanguine} {at} {SoylentNews.Org}> on Saturday December 02 2017, @10:09AM (#604199) Homepage Journal

    Oh, and what's more. from the other TFA [hackernoon.com]:

    Update on 11–29–2017: I’ve posted multiple datasets [kaggle.com] and my code [github.com] containing enough for you to reproduce the analysis. Please share with the rest of us what else you find — *gets on soapbox* — a free internet will always be filled with competing narratives, but well-researched, reproducible data analyses can establish a ground truth and help cut through all of that. Look forward to seeing your analyses & there will be more data to come!]

    This seems pretty up front to me. Let's both go and attempt to reproduce the analysis, Frojack. What? Not interested? Most likely as it won't support your fairy-tale version of reality. Sigh.

    --
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