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99.7 Percent of Unique FCC Comments Favored Net Neutrality, Independent Analysis Finds (vice.com)
When a Stanford researcher removed all the duplicate and fake comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission last year, he found that 99.7 percent of public comments -- about 800,000 in all -- were pro-net neutrality. From a report: "With the fog of fraud and spam lifted from the comment corpus, lawmakers and their staff, journalists, interested citizens and policymakers can use these reports to better understand what Americans actually said about the repeal of net neutrality protections and why 800,000 Americans went further than just signing a petition for a redress of grievances by actually putting their concerns in their own words," Ryan Singel, a media and strategy fellow at Stanford University, wrote in a blog post Monday. Singel released a report [PDF] Monday that analyzed the unique comments -- as in, they weren't a copypasta of one or dozens of other letters -- filed last year ahead of the FCC's decision to repeal federal net neutrality protections. That's from the 22 million total comments filed, meaning that more than 21 million comments were fake, bots, or organized campaigns.
It's terrible that they threw away all the results and claimed they were simply "fake." I'm glad someone has looked at this data. The entire process was a sham when we were told that our comments mattered.
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Come on, Come all -- B. Bailey
on no issue, including net neutrality, is it believable that 99% were in favor...sounds wrong.
nothing to see here - move along
Form letters have long been a popular method for political causes. Though I personally believe there were a significant number of fake submissions too.
We already knew the public wanted to keep net neutrality, but it was the con artist and his cabal who went out of their way to use dead people to prove otherwise.
The FCC, headed by Ajit Pai, lied about having a meltdown because of "being under attack", lied about the number of people who were for repeal, and lied about the need to protect the people from the "scourge" of net neutrality.
And yet, their supporters will simply shrug their shoulders and yell, "BUT HILLARY!!!!", because lying is all they have.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Singel released a report [PDF] Monday that analyzed the unique comments -- as in, they weren't a copypasta of one or dozens of other letters -- filed last year ahead of the FCC's decision to repeal federal net neutrality protections. That's from the 22 million total comments filed, meaning that more than 21 million comments were fake, bots, or organized campaigns.
I quite enjoy how 4chan /b/ terms like copypasta have entered into the lexicon.
Future astroturfing campaigns will be run by AI's.
yum!
Elections in North Korea — and in Saddam Hussein's Iraq — were "won" with the winners getting not the measly 99%, but the nice and round 100% of the vote.
But that's nothing compared to a feat Putin has once accomplished — winning 146% of the vote...
Simply put, as Stalin once said it, "those who vote do not matter — those who count the votes matter". If it is the Vice (or a "researcher" Vice found acceptable) counting, 99.7% may be too low. Indeed, according to TFA, he accepted only 800K out 22 million (merely 3.6%!) of the comments — dismissing the other 96% as "noise".
What exactly was his methodology and could it, possibly, have been biased against those supporting the abolition?..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Let's not forget the kids in cages... Gotta make sure the people responsible for that get their comeuppance.
So 'Copypasta' is a cromulent word now?
A way to vote for something you want or don't want.
The number of comments entered into the system has zero impact on the decision. Nobody at the FCC is counting them, nor should they. This isn't some official opinion poll being conducted here.
The PURPOSE of the public comments at the FCC is to obtain INFORMATION from the public that the FCC may not already have. So unless you are providing a unique prospective or some unique facts about the question being considered that you entered some unique comment into the system your opinion of the question doesn't mean anything. If you are just voicing an opinion in your comment, figure it gets round filed and you just wasted your time and the time of the poor slob at the FCC who's job it is to read and classify all these comments.
I'm sorry if you don't like this, but that's how the FCC works (actually not just the FCC, but other government "public comment" processes too). Most government processes don't care about doing opinion polls, that's the role of the political appointees anyway. So if you didn't like this result, or if you did, you need to vote accordingly.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It's because liberals aren't violent, contrary to what talkshow pundits say for listeners and clicks. And conservatives tolerate liars as long as they are playing for the "right" team.
Either you're happy with Trump and his administration, or you're too feckless to do anything about it.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You still refuse to understand that Obama's "Network Neutrality" was a wolf in sheeps clothing. It injected CALEA, but didn't meaningfully restrict your ISP from classifying their VOD differently than Netflix. All that it protected you from was certain categories of paid prioritization, but not most.
or organized campaigns.
I would hesitate to claim the anti-side wasn't often driven by organized campaigns, either, with many sites exhorting users to go file a letter.
Which is fine, but it's hardly unorganized.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Actually, no, we didn't. There never was a referendum. There were informal polls, but that's it.
The FCC comments aren't binding — and for a good reason: they are open exactly to the kind of abuse you are complaining about. Non-citizen participation (and foreigners openly campaigning), multiple participation, simple ballot-stuffing...
According to TFA, only 3.6% of the comments were "genuine", in the cited researcher's opinion... This would confirm both the insanity of treating the comments as binding in any way, and the truth of the statements made by the FCC, headed Ajit Pai, who is of Indian descent, regarding being under attack. The claim, you — a privileged American White — are calling "a lie" despite evidence and without any evidence of your own, making unprecedented allegations, that can only be motivated by racism.
Of course, having been exposed as a racist liar yourself, you'll simply shrug your narrow shoulders and yell: "BUT TRUMP!!!" — because lying is all you have.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
net neutrality had nothing to do with what an isp charges you, it said isp's could not charge netflix more for using up all the bandwidth. rates charged you are set by the local government who signs an exclusive contract with the local isp. doh.https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/10/15/2024241/997-percent-of-unique-fcc-comments-favored-net-neutrality-independent-analysis-finds#
nothing to see here - move along
How exactly is the OP a racist liar? Not once was race brought into the conversation until the racist (i.e. you) brought it up.
Not only was the OP not racist, s/he also wasn't complaining about abuse of the comments system. GP is strawmanning both the content *and* the point of the OP. That - can only be the tactic of someone who has no real argument to make at all.
What does the public have to do with a public comment period?
NN creates a level playing field for businesses. This is criticaly important for small businesses and startups since there is no traffic bias. No NN stacks the deck in favor of large businesses and corporations, it creates a traffic bias in favor of those businesses that can afford to buy preferential treatment for their network traffic.
Accusing others of being racist is "in style," these days. It is basically just part of the syntax of making a statement of disagreement, and shouldn't be taken seriously in any context.
it's the people who count the votes
It's amazing that, in a country chock full of guns, terrorists like Pai and Kavanaugh don't get assassinated. Must be yellow.
...the American People are now all-in for big gov't and eventually the socialist then communist results of too much of that. Again, like a previous post on a different but similar thread concerning the death of freedom on the USA, I'm glad I'm 71 and either won't see it, or won't be enslaved for long or on my way to one of the resultant death camps from that 20th century ideology responsible for 100 million deaths worldwide. Of course that won't happen because they will have to try to collect up all the guns first, and I will shoot the MF's that show up for mine, and they will kill me there, so no death camp for me...
Just keep heaping on the big gov't, sheeple.,..
This has to be the greatest illustration of that old adage I've seen in a while.
The temptation is to think that 99% of the FCC Net Neutrality comments represents the population at large. Except, there are good reasons to think it does not.
When you have an opt-in design, where the citizen has to do all the work, including finding the FCC site, finding the online submission, writing up the text. Who is going to do that (even if it is really easy)?
What you get are motivated participants. People who are Meh on the whole issue, or lean one way or another but have other priorities, they aren't going to bother. And what I saw during the comment period was a whole lot of motivated Net Neutrality supporters, with a much smaller group of opponents.
This is exactly why population studies that rely upon self-nomination by the participants, are not considered statistically reliable. You can only assign confidence intervals if the study itself selects the participants and tracks them down. Sure, some don't want to participate, and that's exactly the point! Unless you capture the reluctant participants, you can't measure them. And if they absolutely refuse to participate then the study has to decide how to allocate their opinions. This includes the possibility that such people might also refuse to participate in 'real life' voting situations.
Pure opt-in measurement systems all suffer, at least potentially, from this form of statistical bias.
I think the new motto of the Republican Party should be "We don't care about you or what you think."
It's not exactly news that people who are concerned about an issue comment on it more often than people who aren't. Self-selection leads to a biased sample. Surely this is statistics 101 even at Stanford.
Does this chabge anything in th slightest? Will it be reversed? Somebody losing his job?
We live in an age where there is no accountability. This is not the only place where people lied, and admitted guild. There are three letter organisations that admitted guild. Nothing changed. The cheaters won. They will win in the mnext few elections as well. And why not? It pays of.
I just hope that the next revolution is not a bloody one and that it takes place after I died. I do not see a serious change without one. Hope I am wrong.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It doesn't matter if everyone in the country thinks it should be enacted it's still a *BAD* *IDEA*
If you think it's a good idea you are the idiot.
Quit beating a dead horse. The FCC does not and never had the authority to regulate the internet. Any twisting of regulations would go down in a court of law. /. is better than this nonsense.
Yes, a vast majority of people support the IDEA of net neutrality. But let's not forget that the Obama administration and the FCC came up with their own FLAVOR of it and they gave it the same name "Net Neutrality".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7WHoqsRuxU
I'm surprised they were able to separate all comments into simply "for" or "against". My comment was to say that I want to see a more nuanced rethink of the neutrality concept with measurement requirements rather than "saving" an unrealistic philosophical statement with vague exceptions that benefits lawyers more than consumers. I say this as someone involved with filtering backbone traffic for security reasons- both the "treat all traffic equally" and the "except if you're doing network security" are way too open to interpretation.
He is a White calling a Colored a liar. As we've learned during Obama's Presidency, this — or any other criticism — makes the White a racist. Case closed...
What I'm getting from this is that you're a racist and lack basic reasoning skills. Kind of fits with your comments, I guess.
There's a lot of effort to add little meaningful information here. Politics, as usual.
They don't have the power to regulate it? Ha, that's a laugh. The 4th Amendment says that homelands security / TSA doesn't have the power to search and seize without a warrant, but they do it about a million times a day at airports. The airlines themselves could do these searches of passengers getting on airplanes, but its just plain illegal for gov't agents of the TSA to do it. But... they want to, so they do.
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