New York Attorney General Barbara D. Underwood has expanded the investigation into the tens of millions of fraudulent comments the FCC received during the public comment period preceding Ajit Pai’s Republican rollback of net neutrality protections. Underwood’s office added over a dozen subpoenas targeting telecommunications’ lobbyists and advocates, to find out whether or not they were the source of some, if not most of, the anti-net neutrality comments. According to the New York Times, those subpoenaed by Underwood are a who’s who of telecom cash recipients.
The companies and groups subpoenaed on Tuesday, according to the person with knowledge of the investigation, include Broadband for America, Century Strategies and MediaBridge. Broadband for America is a coalition supported by cable and telecommunications companies; Century Strategies is a political consultancy founded by Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition; and MediaBridge is a conservative messaging firm whose website boasts of helping to place hundreds of thousands of comments on net neutrality during Mr. Obama’s presidency on behalf of one client.
A recently published Stanford study on the comments found that the overwhelming tenor of unique comments, those unlikely to have been sent out by some malicious bot, were in support of maintaining net neutrality protections.
So Stanford researcher Ryan Singel set out to determine the viewpoints of the real comments. For his study, titled “Filtering Out the Bots: What Americans Actually Told the FCC about Net Neutrality Repeal,” Singel combed through the more than 22 million comments that were submitted to the FCC. He used a machine learning program to weed out the millions of comments that were fakes and duplicates—as the duplicated messages were almost certainly part of a form letter campaign.
After he filtered out those submissions, he was left with about 800,000 unique comments. Out of all those comments only 0.3 percent supported the repeal of net neutrality. [Emphasis added.]
During the run-up to the FCC’s rollback of net neutrality consumer protections, over 22 million comments flooded the FCC’s server, triggering a crash to the system that helped cast enough doubt on the process that the FCC’s Verizon shill of a chairman, Ajit Pai, was able to discount the public outcry. Not long after, the New York attorney general’s office moved forward on an investigation of the fake comments, identifying at least 2,000,000 fraudulent comments from stolen identities.
Chairman Pai has had to publicly admit, to no one’s surprise, that he and his FCC lied about the nature of the website’s crash, passing the blame onto the Obama administration, because facts mean nothing to propaganda ministers like Pai.