Filtering Out the Bots: What Americans Actually Told the FCC About Net Neutrality Repeal

In the leadup to the Federal Communications Commission's historic vote in Dec 2017 to repeal all network neutrality protections, 22 million comments were filed to the agency. The FCC did nothing to try to prevent comment stuffing and comment fraud, and even after the vote, made no attempt to help the public, journalists, policymakers actually understand what Americans actually told the FCC about the repeal of the 2015 Open Internet Order. This report aims to help make that clear. This report used the 800,000 comments identified as semantic standouts from form letter and fraud campaigns. These unique comments were overwhelmingly in support of keeping the 2015 Open Internet Order - in fact, 99.7% of comments opposed the repeal of net neutrality protections. This report then matched and sorted those comments to geographic areas, including the 50 states and every Congressional District. The creation of these reports also showed that:

• Commenters know what net neutrality is and articulated clearly why they needed the protections
• Rural Americans care about net neutrality, including being concerned about lacking choice of providers
• Support for net neutrality is strong in both Democratic and Republican districts
• The number of comments in midterm races considered to competitive are higher than average