Analysis Questions Authenticity Of FCC Comments

For the second time in less than four years, the FCC is considering regulations regarding net neutrality – the principle that internet service providers must treat all data the same, regardless of the origin or purpose of that data.

Opponents of net neutrality regulations argue that ISPs should have the right to prioritize traffic and charge for their services as they wish. Meanwhile, supporters of net neutrality suggest that so-called fast lanes are anti-competitive and would prevent start-ups and smaller companies from competing with more well-established companies that can afford to pay for prioritized web traffic.

From April 27 to Aug. 30, 2017, the FCC allowed members of the public to formally submit comments on the subject. In total, 21.7 million comments were submitted electronically and posted online for review.

Pew Research Center set out to analyze the opinions of those who had taken the time to submit their thoughts to the FCC. The Center’s analysis of these submissions finds that the comments present challenges to anyone hoping to understand the attitudes of the concerned public regarding net neutrality. It also highlights the ways in which individuals and groups are using modern digital tools to engage in the long-standing practice of speaking out in order to influence government policy decisions. Among the most notable findings:

• Many submissions seemed to include false or misleading personal information. Some 57% of the comments utilized either duplicate email addresses or temporary email addresses created with the intention of being used for a short period of time and then discarded. In addition, many individual names appeared thousands of times in the submissions.
• There is clear evidence of organized campaigns to flood the comments with repeated messages. Of the 21.7 million comments posted, 6% were unique. The other 94% were submitted multiple times – in some cases, hundreds of thousands of times.
• Often, thousands of comments were submitted at precisely the same moment. On nine different occasions, more than 75,000 comments were submitted at the very same second – often including identical or highly similar comments.

The Center conducted its analysis by downloading all the comments from the FCC’s publicly available API. All data and comments used in this report are stored on the FCC’s site and are freely available to the public.