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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:
- One pro-repeal spam campaign used mail-merge to disguise 1.3 million comments as unique grassroots submissions.
- There were likely multiple other campaigns aimed at injecting what may total several million pro-repeal comments into the system.
- It's highly likely that more than 99% of the truly unique comments³ were in favor of keeping net neutrality.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday December 02 2017, @09:24PM
Actually it's not quite that, Buzz. Net Neutrality restricts ISPs from preferring some packets (for whatever reasons) over others. Net Neutrality attempts to make ISP internet connections just "dumb pipes."
Which, at least IMHO, is as it should be. Without Net Neutrality, an ISP can, with impunity, demand protections payments (it'd be a real shame if your network traffic doesn't get to our customers) from SoylentNews, gab.ai, Alex Jones, motherless.com, etc.
What's more, without the requirement that all packets be treated equally, an ISP could just flat block sites they don't like.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr