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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.
And by "aggregating signatures", you mean "posting the same anti-neutrality comment using the names of people who did not submit those comments.
The FCC, of course, refused to remove the comments even when the supposed submitters sent a letter explaining that the comments were fraudulent.
In other words... yes, it was a bot. Whoever did it used a list of names and information to submit the anti-neutrality posts in other people's names. There were no signatures or approvals from the people whose identities were used fraudulently.