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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: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Saturday December 02 2017, @03:39PM (4 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Saturday December 02 2017, @03:39PM (#604301) Journal

    You are apparently unaware that the Federal government has *zero* to do with granting local monopolies/duopolies for ISPs around the country, right?

    Not on a large scale. But the US National Park Service does have that power in Yellowstone National Park. There's probably some other federal property where they have that degree of control.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 02 2017, @07:47PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 02 2017, @07:47PM (#604373)

    Even in the National Petrified Cell Tower Forest?

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 03 2017, @03:57AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 03 2017, @03:57AM (#604561) Journal
      Petrified cell towers nestled in petrified forests as petrified tourists take selfies on their petrified cell phones with petrified birds singing petrified songs. It's a rocking place.

  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday December 02 2017, @08:32PM (1 child)

    by NotSanguine (285) <{NotSanguine} {at} {SoylentNews.Org}> on Saturday December 02 2017, @08:32PM (#604386) Homepage Journal

    And how many *paying* (for Internet access, not to visit the National Park) customers are involved?

    You're attempting (poorly) to distract from what's really going on. I'm not surprised.

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

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 03 2017, @03:47AM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 03 2017, @03:47AM (#604559) Journal
      It's still larger than zero. And I don't care that the thread got off message.