Millions of comments sent to FCC through bulk system used fake email addresses

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai actually allowed the weight of public comments on the FCC's proposed changes to network neutrality regulations to sway (or confirm) his position, he seems to have given more credence to the "opinions" of spam-generating software "bots" than actual citizens, researchers have found. Leah Figueroa, lead data engineer at the data analytics software company Gravwell, presented a detailed analysis of the public comments submitted to the FCC regarding network neutrality. Applying filters to the more than 22 million comments submitted to the FCC, Figueroa and her team attempted to identify which comments were submitted by real US citizens—and which were generated by bulk-uploading bots. 

Only 17.4 percent of the comments submitted were unique; in one case, the same comment was uploaded over one million times. In many cases, artifacts of database merge templates or programmatically generated text were found in submissions—waves of submissions from "people" living in the state of "{STATE}" were uploaded just before torrents of comment submissions by bots. Of those comments that were clearly submitted directly to the FCC (rather than through a bulk upload system), the vast majority favored network neutrality. And while "the majority of the raw total number of comments fall into the anti-neutrality camp," Figueroa said, the majority of the comments that were likely organic—including those submitted through another system—were in favor of network neutrality.