More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked

I used natural language processing techniques to analyze network neutrality comments submitted to the Federal Communications Commission from April-October 2017, and the results were disturbing. NY Attorney General Schneiderman estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans’ identities were stolen and used in spam campaigns that support repealing net neutrality. My research found at least 1.3 million fake pro-repeal comments, with suspicions about many more. In fact, the sum of fake pro-repeal comments in the proceeding may number in the millions. In this post, I will point out one particularly egregious spambot submission, make the case that there are likely many more pro-repeal spambots yet to be confirmed, and estimate the public position on net neutrality in the “organic” public submissions. Key findings:

• One pro-repeal spam campaign used mail-merge to disguise 1.3 million comments as unique grassroots submissions.
• There were likely multiple other campaigns aimed at injecting what may total several million pro-repeal comments into the system.
• It’s highly likely that more than 99% of the truly unique comments were in favor of keeping net neutrality.