Nearly Half Net Neutrality Comments From Fake Email Addresses, Pew Research Finds
As the United States Federal Communications Commission readies to repeal the current rules that protect net neutrality, a new Pew Research study of the millions of public comments submitted regarding the issue found that many comments were duplicates and a majority came from temporary email addresses.
The Pew Research Center analyzed more the more than 21.7 million comments submitted to the FCC during the recent public commenting period. It found that just seven comments accounted for 38 percent of all submissions and 57 percent of comments came from users who did not use their real email address.
Of the seven comments that accounted for nearly two-fifths of all the submissions made during the public comment period six argued against net neutrality and supported the position of current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who intends to undo the existing rules designed to protect the principle that requires all data to be treated as equal by internet service providers.
While the majority of the most-repeated comments opposed net neutrality, those in support of the principle were not without their own copy-and-paste comments. Pew’s study found that only six percent of all comments submitted to the FCC were unique. Ninety-four percent of comments received by the commission were submitted multiple times. Pew called its findings “clear evidence of organized campaigns to flood the comments with repeated messages.”
Adding to that evidence was the fact that there were nine instances of 75,000 or more comments submitted at the very same second, suggesting an automated process was involved. In six of those nine instances, the mass influx of comments contained statements that opposed current net neutrality protections.
The discovery that 57 percent of comments were made with temporary or disposable email addresses is not necessarily indicative of anything; because comments are publicly accessible, some commenters may have chosen to use a temporary email in place of making their personal email address available to anyone browsing the FCC comments.
However, Pew noted the use of temporary emails makes it difficult to confirm the veracity of the comments. Automated campaigns could use temporary emails to leave thousands of comments and it would be impossible to differentiate between those and comment made by actual citizens attempting to engage on the matter.
Further muddling the authenticity of many of the comments was the fact that thousands of the submissions were made with duplicate names or non-names, including some users submitting comments with names like “Net Neutrality” and “The Internet.” Just three percent of the comments definitively went through the FCC’s email verification process, according to Pew.
“When the Center analyzed the comments submitted during the 2014 net neutrality debate, about 450,000 comments were submitted to the FCC,” Aaron Smith, associate director of research at Pew Research Center, said.
“This year’s comment volume dwarfed that and our analysis highlights the relative ease with which online commenting systems allow groups and individuals to mount large-scale campaigns for public policies. Such efforts were difficult to orchestrate in the pre-internet era and even three years ago were not taking place at the scale it has this time.”
The comment process for net neutrality has been the cause of significant controversy over the course of the net neutrality debate.
The comment site supposedly came under siege earlier this year by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack following a segment on John Oliver’s HBO show Last Week Tonight. The attack made it impossible for people to leave comments just after Oliver called for viewers to show their support for current net neutrality protections.
While the FCC has held it was a DDoS attack that took down the site, attempts to have the agency provide documentation of such attacks have been rejected . Lawmakers and activists have called for the release of any information about the attack but have been denied at every turn by the commission.
Shortly after the DDoS attack, a wave of identical comments supporting the FCC’s proposal began appearing. More than 450,000 comments were posted using data gathered from real estate websites to attach personal information to the comments without permission—including names, addresses, and contact information of people who did not post the comments.
A n umber of analyses that looked at the collection of comments left on the FCC’s site have concluded that the process was dominated primarily by bots and automated systems, which may have hurt the perception of the process, making it easy to dismiss public opinion as the product of a relatively small number of people running automated campaigns.
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