Politics
Out of context: Reply #28431
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- yuekit2
More Than 80% Of All Net Neutrality Comments Were Sent By Bots, Researchers Say
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.
- To give some background, the FCC is legally required to take public comments into consideration in changing their policies.yuekit
- This seems like an attempt by the ISPs to nullify that, by creating a situation where "no one can know" how many comments are pro or against.yuekit
- Isn't almost 4 million unique comments still significant?
I also wonder if many people just pasted in pre-written comments and those were counted as 'bots'akiersky