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Senators and companies alike may be trying to bring back net neutrality protections, but it’s important to realize that net neutrality is dead, for now. Even as the public was given time to comment on the matter and was granted an extension too, it didn’t really matter to FCC chairman Ajit Pai that ultimately still decided to gut the net neutrality protections.
That being said, there’s some new evidence that’s bringing more light on the fake comments debate. More evidence shows just how fake submissions to governmental site were, including that more than one million bulk submissions were fake email addresses from pornhub.com.
Reported by Ars Technica, Gravwell security researcher Leah Figueroa and her team dug deep and analyzed more than 22 million comments that were submitted to the FCC, trying to figure out whether they were real or fake. Their analysis separated “organic” comments submitted by real humans from automated comments from bots. Hundreds of comments were apparently filed with identical time stamps, while other were submitted at a steady rate, which is unlike how humans would submit their comments. More comments were submitted with all-caps emails, which is a strong indication of generated or submitted emails form a database, report Ars Technica.
Here’s where things get even more interesting, so hold onto your seat. According to Ars, only 17.4 percent of the comments that were submitted were actually unique; one comment was even uploaded more than one million times. Figueroa, while at the Shmoocon information security conference, said that “the majority of the raw total number of comments fall into the anti-net neutrality camp,” but here’s the thing: many of the comments that were submitted by actual humans were in favor of net neutrality.
