How a bot made 1 million comments against net neutrality look genuine

“Gathering and analyzing comments from the public is an important part of the Federal Communications Commission’s rulemaking process,” the American agency says on its website. But analyzing those comments increasingly means reading the thoughts of spambots. Automated comments are now part of political reality: During 2016’s US presidential race, a large proportion of tweets supporting both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton came from automated accounts. These bots send messages en masse, originating from one source and usually conveying a particular ideology. Some are easy to spot. But others can be well-written and pass under the radar, making top-down campaigns look like they have more supporters on the ground. Some pretty crude comment campaigns responded: One statement, that the Obama administration’s neutrality rules are “smothering innovation,” appears verbatim over 800,000 times in the FCC’s comment database. It’s not clear whether these comments came from a spambot or a highly motivated get-out-the-comment effort. What is obvious, though, is that all of these comments came from a single source.

While maintaining variation is easy for a computer, the chances that actual people submitted over a million variations of this highly specific theme, without overlapping once, are extremely low. Therefore, these comments are most likely the result of a spam campaign designed to make them look like the concerns of normal citizens.  What does this say about the state of support for net neutrality? There were indeed similar campaigns on the other side of the spectrum— a person identified a set of around 100,000 comments that advocated for keeping the Obama rules in place, and followed a similar template. But when he removed all of the clusters of similar comments, as well as all of the duplicates, 99% of the remaining comments supported keeping net neutrality. But at least we now know what the bots think.