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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: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 02 2017, @10:20AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 02 2017, @10:20AM (#604204)

    Yes, you're wrong. No I won't post the *thousands* of links that explain exactly why you're wrong.

    I know a naked ASSertion when I see one.

    If a plan involves adding MORE government to enforce MORE arbitrary rules at gunpoint, I'm almost always against it. A fancy name dressed up in scare tactics doesn't change that. Incidentally, without government force, the monopolisitc and abusive ISPs would be shunned and die as they would then need to rely on the quality of their services alone for survival.

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  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday December 02 2017, @10:31AM

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Saturday December 02 2017, @10:31AM (#604207) Homepage Journal

    I did the research (including actually reading the the law and the regulations, as well as a wide variety of other information).

    I won't do your research for you. Remain ignorant if you like. It's no skin off my nose. But it's sad.

    Pick one of these [brainyquote.com] and kick yourself in the ass for being lazy.

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