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.

Comments

Ajit Pai and Donald Trump are both traitors.

[Anonymous Coward]

Get rid of em.

Re: Ajit Pai and Donald Trump are both traitors.

[Opportunist]

Observation bias much?

Take a wild guess who gets up and moves once across the globe, the achievers or the couch potatoes? Now compare the handful of "successful fresh off the boat" people to the amount of people in India.

If you try to compare something, at least TRY to make them comparable.

Re:Ajit Pai and Donald Trump are both traitors.

[thegreatbob]

Cthuhu wasn't on the ballot, sadly.

95% of the bots

[Anonymous Coward]

Were 3rd party sites aggregating signatures from a campaign. But yeah, "BOTS!".

Re:95% of the bots

[GrumpySteen]

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.

Thanks captn obvious

[burtosis]

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!

Re:Thanks captn obvious

[Solandri]

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?

There are actually two possible solutions here, only one of which is net neutrality.

• No net neutrality. But also no government-granted monopolies. If people actually had a choice of ISPs, any ISP trying to charge websites for access would be shooting themselves in the foot. Their customers would notice Netflix was slow, hear that Netfix was fine on their friend's ISP, and switch their service to the other ISP.
• Keep the government-granted monopolies. Use net neutrality to keep them in check. Basically more government regulation to fix a problem created in the first pace by government regulation. ISPs can succeed in making websites pay them for "fast lanes" only because they know their customers are their captives. Instead of the customers being able to access the website via a different ISP, the website has no choice but to pay the ISP if it wants those customers to have access.

FWIW, most of the rest of the world uses the first one.

Re:Thanks captn obvious

[Opportunist]

How about net neutrality AND dropping government mandated monopolies? Ever thought about that?

Re:Thanks captn obvious

[swb]

The problem with your scenario is that it presents a false choice by framing ISP monopolies only existing because of government approval. That may be true for cable television franchises specifically, but not internet access.

The reality is that utilities are fairly close to a natural monopoly because of the complex infrastructure required. We lack competition not because of government granted monopolies, but because duplicating infrastructure is expensive and the economics of it are poor (essentially your are splitting a fixed market against an entrenched competitor).

What we need is for the government to acknowledge the existing monopoly status and impose a means of regulation that limits exploitation of the monopoly that already exists, and probably further, does something to eliminate the ability of a monopoly to exist (ie, a municipal fiber network with equal access at the head end).

This isn't voting.

[volkris]

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.

Re:This isn't voting.

[dunkindave]

Oh you poor naive fool.

Congress deliberately passes broad sweeping laws that leave a lot of discretion for the enacting agencies since Congress can't be bothered by the minutia. In this case it is the FCC that put the current Net-Neutrality provisions in place, not Congress, and the FCC can take them away. The comments aren't a vote, but they will certainly be used by the politicians to justify their actions - "Look, we were doing what the public demanded. 90% of those commenting were against Net Neutrality, so we did what they public wanted us to do."

Re:This isn't voting.

[hey!]

While what you say about this not being an election is true, this actually raises an interesting question: if the number of comments support a certain position has no effect on the outcome, why was this bot campaign conducted?

There are broadly speaking two possible answers. The first is that the people who orchestrated the campaign do not understand how these regulatory decisions will be made. The second possibility is that they *do* understand, but believe that the appearance of widespread public support will either influence those decisions, or provide some kind of useful pretext for making unpopular decisions.

Re:does not *necessarily* mean bots

[Opportunist]

Yes. If it's not worth your time to think for a moment and formulate your own concerns, I guess the matter isn't important enough for you to consider your input valuable, because it's likely you didn't bother to learn about it to make an informed decision whether you're for or against it.

We already have enough idiots parroting what somebody else tells them.