net neutrality Up to 9.5 million net neutrality comments made with fake/stolen identities

[indrora]

Ars Technica ( https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/up-to-9-5-million-net-neutrality-comments-were-made-with-stolen-identities/ ) reports that the NY Attorney General's office estimates that 9.5 million net neutrality comments were made under assumed identities and is looking into the possibility that the comments were made automatically by those in the Telco lobbying industry, among others. Lots of subpoenas have been issued and there's still a deep, ongoing investigation, but the scope has been broadening with each little nugget of information that comes out of the office. Unsirprisingly, letters that were not obviously from a form-filler appear to have been quite positive:

Quote

A new study by Stanford's Center for Internet and Society found that more than 800,000 of the comments were "semantic outliers, e.g. not part of a form letter campaign."

"A manual analysis of 1,000 of these comments showed that 99.7 percent of the comments opposed the repeal," the Stanford report said. Comments were submitted to the FCC in large numbers from both Democratic and Republican parts of the country, and the analysis showed that commenters generally understood the issue of net neutrality despite its somewhat arcane nature.

This comes after the NY AG's office estimated that two million of these were from fake/stolen identities last year, a more than  four times increase in the sheer number of fraudulent comments made to the FCC.

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Thoughts: I'm not surprised. Is anyone surprised? Wait, hold on, I am a little surprised: Nine million comments is a lot of comments. I'm not surprised that there were quite this many comments, however. I wonder how much crow that oversize Reese's mug can hold?

[Jurrunio]

bots. bots everywhere

[Fasauceome]

I remember reading about this a while ago. The comments all shared such distinct expression in terms of repealing net neutrality, like there was a huge list of them and if you read them back to back they all sounded exactly the same, while the anti repeal comments had much much more variety. 

[Syntaxvgm]

The US population is 325.7 million. 74.2 million of that is children (under 18) leaving us with 251.5 million.

 

About 32 million are estimated to be illiterate leaving us with 219 million. Not taking out the number for people who would be unable to comment due to mental retardation another circumstance, 4.3 percent of people able to comment made a comment on one viewpoint on this niche issue to the fcc. 136 votes were cast in the 2016 election, and that means an amount equivalent 6.9% of people that cared to vote for the presidential election left a comment specifically against net neutrality. A population about the size of Michigan or three times the size of puerto rico left a comment against NN on the FCC site. 

This is more fake anti NN votes than copies sold of Halo 3 in its first year. 
I have yet to meet a non tech person that understood what NN is, and I'm asked all the time. 

This is in addition to real anti NN comments and pro NN comments. 

That doesn't sound like believable numbers.