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More Than 80 Percent of All Net Neutrality Comments Were Sent By Bots, Researchers Say (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: The Trump administration and its embattled FCC commissioner are on a mission to roll back the pro-net neutrality rules approved during the Obama years, despite the fact that most Americans support those safeguards. But there is a large number of entities that do not: telecom companies, their lobbyists, and hordes of bots. Of all the more than 22 million comments submitted to the FCC website and through the agency's API found that only 3,863,929 comments were "unique," according to a new analysis by Gravwell, a data analytics company. The rest? A bunch of copy-pasted comments, most of them likely by automated astroturfing bots, almost all of them -- curiously -- against net neutrality. "Using our (admittedly) simple classification, over 95 percent of the organic comments are in favor of Title II regulation," Corey Thuen, the founder of Gravwell, told Motherboard in an email.
Get rid of em.
Were 3rd party sites aggregating signatures from a campaign. But yeah, "BOTS!".
No matter what the provenance is of the comments, Ajit Pai and The Donald will use them in their favor as political cover for whatever they want to do.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I wonder if the bots are aware that they will be the first to get throttled once net neutrality has been repealed?
It's easy to hate on the singularly hateable, and deservingly hated, personage of Donald Trump.
But you know what? Trump did everything humanly possible short of literally strapping on a giant unkempt beard and walking out the front door of Trump Tower naked holding up a giant sign saying "I AM YUGELY UNFIT FOR OFFICE, BIGLY DO NOT VOTE FOR ME" to prove that he was not fit to be president.
Having voted for Trump says more about Trumpers than about him. It was a test of ability to discern right from wrong, and just enough people failed it.
Who the hell would be against net neutrality except a few straggling brainwashed fools who would have a different opinion if they only knew what was real? Yes sign me up for vastly increased monthly payments, squish small businesses and startups, micro payments on everything net related, separate fees to access different sites, suppress competing services and views not held by big ISPs, and hell yes please make internet access whitelist sites only for my own protection and those of DRM!!1!!!1!
riiight
Bots promoting policy positions that will weaken American world dominance.
I don't want to rush in to judgment but it seems like a familiar pattern...
Slashdot needs to give its readers more context in these posts about regulation feedback. Specifically, it needs to emphasize that in the US regulatory process, this comment phase is not voting. The numbers don't really enter into it.
The regulator has to address issues raised in comments, but that's about counting issues, not comments. An issue with one comment is to be addressed just as an issue brought up by a thousand comments.
The FCC is subject to the laws our representatives pass. THAT's where we give the marching orders. This regulatory process is only about seeing to it that the commission implements the laws handed to it.
Next astroturfing campaign to feign overwhelming opposition to an extremely popular idea - use an algorithm to generate the complaint, copy and paste is too easy to spot.
Of all the more than 22 million comments submitted to the FCC website and through the agency's API found that only 3,863,929 comments were "unique,"
I've seen many such campaigns on the web, and it is common for both sides to supply a "cut and paste this text" comment to send in, for people who don't want to bother composing one themselves. I've seen this plenty on sides I agree with.
I don't think you can automatically assume "bot" just from a lot of repeated comments. I'm not saying they're all not bots. I'm just saying it is common to see identical comments from non-bot entities.
I for one like net neutrality. But let's be honest, the comments I sent in support of net neutrality were standard from the EFF (basically copy pasted). Is it possible the same process is being used for those that oppose net neutrality? A standard website that says "show your support against net neutrality" and then gives the user a standard comment that is most usually clicked out of laziness.
Emailed and received a response from Gravwell.
I asked "How many of these bots are from aggregation campaigns?"
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It's tough to say exactly. The FCC submission site supports filling out a form directly on their web page as well as bulk submission via file upload. Just because a comment comes in via the bulk submission method doesn't mean it is a bot.
We were able to identify some easy ways to classify a comment as coming from a person submitting to the website vs a bulk submission. Then we filtered out submissions from bots who were automatically posting to the website and that's when we tried to assess political opinion.
Without more detailed logs from FCC IT operations acquired through FOIA or public release, it's tough to say if a comment came from a specific campaign. About the only way to classify is by exact comment text. We extracted the most common submissions and counted them (which you can see in the Google sheet linked on the blog).
Hope that helps.
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In other words "We don't know and we don't have the information to answer."
The little git in charge of the FCC will get rid of Net Neutrality, in favor of big ISPs wanting to double/triple dip to get money out of web companies, when they already make money for the service the provide, ie Internet access.
It shouldn't matter where the data you access come from, you're paying the ISP to have access to this data. The ISP shouldn't be paid by content maker to give you the privilege of accessing this data "faster"(at normal speed after they slowed down everything once net neutrality rules go away) when you're already paying them and the content provider is also paying their ISP to allow this data to reach everyone.
It was obvious to me at the time. In fact I said as much here on Slashdot when the story of the flood of anti-NN comments was posted.
Dear Gravwell, Please provide the originating IP addresses of all the ass-surfing bots. Thanks in advance.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Roughly 1% of Americans favor net neutrality.
No matter what the provenance is of the comments, Ajit Pai and The Donald will use them in their favor as political cover for whatever they want to do.
It's unfortunate that the economy is going great, leadership had a strong response to 3 successive hurricanes, we got out of TPP and the Paris accord, and have cracked down on illegal immigration.
Otherwise, what you are moaning about could be construed as a bad thing.
When I first saw the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, I read through it cover to cover. When I prepared my response, I made an effort to answer all of the questions I was competent to respond to. I also made a proposal (in a separate comment) of an alternative to the black-and-white stance, by providing a nice grey option. I've not seen any response to either. And, given the bias of the current Commission, I don't expect to see any discussion of my contributions. Feh.
Bots, fake comments, and the government doing unpopular things.
Are you starting to sense a pattern here?
You are welcome on my lawn.
We've been hearing about how robots are coming after our jobs. Now they are even getting into politics!
I'm just glad they are supporting net neutrality!
The current head of the FCC, Ajit Pai so blatantly has his head up the ass of so many major cable companies and yet people just ignore that fact. If anyone deserves to get kicked out of a government position, it's him. This shit needs to stop.
See, they're ALREADY attacking the humans! We thought their first attack would involve rogue drones and humanoid nightmare terror-robots who look like gleaming, chrome skeletons, with glowing red eye sockets, and it turns out, no, the first strike was an effort to end net neutrality!
Judgement Day is upon us!
"When Net Neutrality ends, it's gonna feel pretty FUCKIN' REAL to you too!" ~ Sarah Connor (to her psychiatrist who thinks the coming net neutrality apocalypse she's trying to warn everyone about is just in her imagination!)
No reason domain veto rights should rest in the hands of a group inclusive of repressive regimes ranging from 3rd world dictators to China to the UK. It's the American internet, Obama's worst move in terms of the internet was pushing to have censorship authority transferred out of the US.
Shocking turn of events - the negative ads purchased by the Russians to install a Fascist in office leading to a crackdown on the Freedom of Speech followed by limiting access to non-state-run media. How is this news? /. has really gone downhill lately.
It totally makes sense to follow rules written by someone who has no idea what their talking about! (:?-==)
I saw this on Trumpreport. #winnign!!!
NO!T
When 95% of the constituents are for net neutrality, bribing them would not be cost-effective. Bribing the representatives, in contrast, is.
When the first debate came up years ago I was huge supporter. Since then however, I just don't give a shit anymore. With the prevalence of DRM, always online garbage, and now domain level censorship. What is left to lose?
Consumers really have no need for ISP's in the first place. The internet is merely a network and can be extended fairly easily using a mesh network. If you're not familiar with the term look it up. Of course, government tries to prevent circumventing monopolies through use of FCC regulations, but still possible. A simple mesh network would provide everyone with free internet access and would put the power back into the hands of the consumers. There are several mesh networks already available and new ones being developed right now such as sonnet. Mix this technology with advanced compression and encryption algorithms and voila. It's just a matter of it gaining wider public attention, so eliminating net neutrality will have backfiring consequences even if those consequences involve consumers doing away with ISP's altogether.
And they determined these were bots, and not some website trying to be "helpful" by giving people a pre-filled response to send? Probably half the people I know that sent comments in support of net neutrality used something like that, because it's quicker than them trying to figure out what to say when they have zero technical background...
But yeah, bots. Sure.
I am utterly shocked to hear there is a group of companies who are racing to the bottom on customer care while racing to the top on pricing and bundling.
And this SAME GROUP is having cheap, automated spam thrown at the FCC in an apparent attempt to kill off measures that would encourage fair competition and prevent vertical monopolies.
In all seriousness, I am surprised. I expected outright bribes---or campaign contributions, whatever they call it these days. Maybe they're trying to cheap out on that too.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Vice is not a news source
Vice is not a news source
Vice is not a news source
Vice is not a news source
Vice is not a news source
Vice is not a news source
Vice is not a news source
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95% of "organic" comments were pro mega-corp ? I find that very difficult to believe; actually, I don't believe it.
This is /. - I thought SOMEONE would have thought to write a "bot" to add comments FOR net neutrality, although considering it's got a fucken API I doubt the program could be called a "bot". Really starting to hate that word btw. Personally in my country net neutrality was never in place, you can surf netflix and facebook even when all other websites are reduced to a crawl, which is great for netflix but I fucken hate facebook (but it does stop the wife bitching, so can't really complain).
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
What safeguards is net neutrality?
Net neutrality rules is giving hackers an open door to stop the Internet completely.
Why shouldn't those who are able to code a bot be welcome to have it cast more votes for them? Capability here is the currency, and money is free speech.
tone
I see a lot of comments here suggesting that these anti-net neutrality posts may not have been a bot campaign but some kind of canned message opposite to the EFF campaign. I happened to be submitting a comment on the FCC site while the bot campaign was running, and you could refresh the site and see each time-stamped comment as it came in. The bot comments were all identical text, which could be expected even it it weren't a bot, but the obvious thing that tipped me off while looking at it was that the comments were coming into the site in alphabetical order of lastname, firstname. Ultimately, there were millions of them, and they all came in perfect alphabetical order. I thought it was such an obvious ploy that they would pause the comment period and clear out the phony comments, but I guess since the comments were what they wanted, it's better for them just to leave them and count them as real votes.