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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.

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  1. Thanks captn obvious by burtosis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!