{"id":28301,"date":"2017-11-25T13:10:35","date_gmt":"2017-11-25T18:10:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28301"},"modified":"2017-11-25T13:10:35","modified_gmt":"2017-11-25T18:10:35","slug":"more-than-a-million-pro-repeal-net-neutrality-comments-were-likely-faked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28301","title":{"rendered":"More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely\u00a0Faked"},"content":{"rendered":"
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More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely\u00a0Faked<\/a><\/h3>\n

I used natural language processing techniques to analyze net neutrality comments submitted to the FCC from April-October 2017, and the results were disturbing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Spot the fake comment. Surprise\u200a\u2014\u200athey\u2019re all\u00a0fake.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NY Attorney General Schneiderman estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans\u2019 identities were stolen<\/a> 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 \u201corganic\u201d public submissions.\u00b9<\/p>\n

Key Findings:\u00b2<\/h3>\n
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  1. One pro-repeal spam campaign used mail-merge to disguise 1.3 million comments<\/em><\/strong> as unique grassroots submissions.<\/li>\n
  2. There were likely multiple other campaigns aimed at injecting what may total several million<\/em><\/strong> pro-repeal comments into the system.<\/li>\n
  3. It\u2019s highly likely that more than 99%<\/em><\/strong> of the truly unique comments\u00b3 were in favor of keeping net neutrality.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n
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    Breaking Down the Submissions<\/h3>\n

    Given the well<\/a> documented<\/a> irregularities throughout the comment submission process, it was clear from the start that the data was going to be duplicative and messy. If I wanted to do the analysis without having to set up the tools and infrastructure typically used for \u201cbig data,\u201d I needed to break down the 22M+ comments and 60GB+ worth of text data and metadata into smaller pieces.\u2074<\/p>\n

    Thus, I tallied up the many duplicate comments\u2075 and arrived at 2,955,182 unique comments and their respective duplicate counts. I then mapped each comment into semantic space vectors\u2076 and ran some clustering algorithms on the meaning of the comments.\u2077 This method identified nearly 150 clusters of comment submission texts of various sizes.\u2078<\/p>\n

    …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely\u00a0Faked I used natural language processing techniques to analyze net neutrality comments submitted to the FCC from April-October 2017, and the results were disturbing. Spot the fake comment. Surprise\u200a\u2014\u200athey\u2019re all\u00a0fake. NY Attorney General Schneiderman estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans\u2019 identities were stolen and used […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[17176,12961,17175,14273,3828],"class_list":["post-28301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-faked-comments","tag-fcc","tag-jeff-kao","tag-medium","tag-net-neutrality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28301"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28302,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28301\/revisions\/28302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}