Stanford study says almost every unique FCC comment was pro-net neutrality

When the FCC asked for public comment on its plan to end net neutrality last year, the docket was swarmed with millions of comments from bots. The fake comments used real identities and made it difficult for anyone perusing the system to find legitimate commenters trying to express their views. A new study from a Stanford researcher sheds some light on the issue. By analyzing more than 800,000 comments that were “semantic outliers” — comments that were unique and not obviously produced by some form of automation — the study found that commenters were overwhelmingly in favor of net neutrality. The study did not account for “real” comments that were filed through systems like forms, but it still provides a window into commenters’... Continue reading…