SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A bot is thought to be behind the posting of thousands of messages to the FCC's website, in an apparent attempt to influence the results of a public solicitation for feedback on net neutrality.
Late last month, FCC chairman Ajit Pai announced his agency's plans to roll back an Obama-era framework for net neutrality, which rule that internet providers must treat all internet content equally.
Since then, the FCC's public comments system has been flooded with a barrage of comments -- well over half-a-million responses at the time of writing -- in part thanks to comedian John Oliver raising the issue on his weekly show on Sunday.
[...] But a sizable portion of those comments are fake, and are repeating the same manufactured response again and again:
[...] "The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation," the comment says. "I urge the Federal Communications Commission to end the bureaucratic regulatory overreach of the internet known as Title II and restore the bipartisan light-touch regulatory consensus that enabled the internet to flourish for more than 20 years."
NotSanguine called it! https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=19421&cid=506966
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 11 2017, @05:00PM (2 children)
I mean just look at the stupid obnoxious message and low brow spam tactics.
But don't investigate Russia as the source, supremo Trump might fire you...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday May 11 2017, @10:08PM (1 child)
This gang didn't care whether Trump or Clinton won. Once it was down to those two, they knew that no matter who won they'd have a corporate-owned president with no real principles who would gladly do what they wanted for a quick buck.
According to opensecrets [opensecrets.org], Comcast gave $1.8 million to Republicans, and $1.4 million to Democrats. AT&T dropped about $1.3 million on Democrats, and $2 million on Republicans. Including substantial direct support for Hillary Clinton in both cases, and she of course knows who's keeping her bread buttered.
These guys don't have a political party. They just have politicians that they buy up. Had Hillary Clinton won, I'm quite certain she would have moved to gut the net neutrality rules as quickly as possible, because there's bipartisan consensus for it (i.e. the telecoms have bought up politicians on both sides of the aisle) and she would have wanted to maximize the time between negative headlines about it and her re-election campaign.
Trump probably doesn't even have to be bought, of course: He would like to gut net neutrality rules so that he and his staff could have websites with inconvenient information on them slowed to the point of being inaccessible to ordinary citizens. Clinton was probably going to be more subtle about it, working with search engines and Facebook and the like to treat inconvenient information as "fake news" and thus not something the public should be able to easily find.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 13 2017, @01:36AM
Telecoms gave more to the democrats than the republicans in 2008/12. Obama still put a strong FCC chair in place.