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Radio News: Net neutrality commenting system was hijacked
Dec 03, 2017 10:50 pm
Todd Shields reports at Bloomberg that 7.75 million comments were submitted to the Federal Communications Commission about net neutrality from email domains attributed to FakeMailGenerator.com. Another 444,938 of the 22 million comments came from Russian email addresses, according to a Pew Research study. There’s “clear evidence of organized campaigns to flood the comments with repeated messages," the Pew study found, saying 94 percent of comments were submitted multiple times. About 7.6 million comments used the phrase, “I am in favor of strong net neutrality under Title II of the Telecommunications Act.” A study by Emprata reported that the comments that were personalized, or those with phrases that appeared only once in the docket, favored retaining the net neutrality rules by a margin of 1.5 million versus 23,000 for repeal. Clearly, the FCC commenting system has been hijacked.