Anybody Surprised? 18 Million FCC Net Neutrality Comments Were Fake

…out of a total of 22 million.

From Engadget:

Before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to repeal net neutrality at the end of 2017, the agency collected public opinion on the policy. In all, it said it received nearly 22 million comments. Over the years, there’s been a fair amount of discussion surrounding where many of those came from, with a study from that same year suggesting that only six percent of the comments were unique.

Following years of investigation, the Office of New York State Attorney General Letitia James has published a report on exactly what happened in 2017. The investigation found the “largest” broadband companies funded a secret astroturfing campaign to push the FCC toward repealing net neutrality. At the time, AT&T, Comcast, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon (Engadget’s parent company) were in favor of repealing the policy. The industry hired several third-party firms to build public support for their decision. Ostensibly, those companies were supposed to convince people to support the broadband industry with incentives like gift cards and prizes. Instead, they simply submitted 8.5 million fake comments. The attorney general has fined three of the companies involved in sending in those comments $4.4 million.

On the other side, the FCC received another 9.3 million fake comments in support of maintaining net neutrality. According to the report, most of those came from a single college student, who was 19 at the time…

Read the rest.


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2 Comments

  1. That’s really odd. Large broadband companies gained the most from “Net Neutrality.”

  2. Most online reviews are fake. A database of 200,00 people who submit bogus online reviews was exposed in the news.

    I remember seeing gas generator reviews for solar generators. Apparently they don’t know the product they are reviewing.

    I studied kerosene heaters and you have to trim or adjust the wick every half hour or they can catch fire and blow up. I read an online review of someone claiming to buy one and he said he turns it on and leaves the house.

    In honest reviews, there are all kinds. People who are too nice to leave an honest or critical reviews and people who don’t know how to use a product. A lot of the products I buy online are not properly or fully described.

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