[DigitalJinx]

There was a flood of anti Net neutrality comments on the FCC website. After the show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver did a segment about net neutrality. The FFC's website was shutdown by a supposed DDos attack. After the site went back up it was quickly flooded with anti net neutrality spam.

What's everyone's take on this? Personally I think that ISP's or other corporations took down the site in order to prevent posting, then later when spam bots where ready the site came back on to flood the site.

[insidious]

Total BS. They're definitely hoping to use this so that they can say something like "Well, we got 8XXK comments pro net-neutrality but we also got 5XXK anti net-neutrality. I guess it's pretty split, so we're just going to go ahead and fuck over net neutrality and see what happens!"

Fuck them. I can only hope the people who "commented" sue the FCC over identity fraud and net themselves a pretty buck. I don't usually vouch for shit Court Cases like that one, but this is just absurd.

It's either the FCC botting, an ISP, or some other corporation. I don't know any single citizen that is actually anti net neutrality,

[mothered]

Personally I think that ISP's or other corporations took down the site in order to prevent posting, then later when spam bots where ready the site came back on to flood the site.

Very difficult (If not Impossible) to determine exactly what happened from an external perspective.

Although not entirely accurate, I'd be Interested to see what the log files contain.

[DigitalJinx]

If you look at who has the most to benefit and the resources to do that you can narrow it down to a group of people. Plus if you add on the fact that the chance of both of these things happening back-to-back, it is easy to see that something is influencing this.

[DigitalJinx]

More info i've been looking into

The site was then was quickly flooded with comment against net-neutrality. Almost all comments were identical in nature implying this was done spur of the moment (http://bgr.com/2017/05/11/fcc-net-neutrality-comments/). The content of the comment was the following.

Code:

“The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation. I urge the Federal Communications Commission to end the bureaucratic regulatory overreach of the internet known as Title II and restore the bipartisan light-touch regulatory consensus that enabled the internet to flourish for more than 20 years. The plan currently under consideration at the FCC to repeal Obama's Title II power grab is a positive step forward and will help to promote a truly free and open internet for everyone.” Spammed Comment found on FCC’s website against net neutrality

Sources point to a lobbying group known as CFIF (Center for Individual Freedom) a conservative group, who was a strong financer and owner of www.stopnetregulation.org back in 2010 when Obama passes net neutrality as law(http://gizmodo.com/can-john-oliver-s-pro...1795095982). There is also suggestion that a lobbying group broadband for America also could be involved.
Gizmodo sent an email about the spam botting and received a reply claiming no responsibility. However, when looking at the CFIF’s letter to the FCC page it’s comment section matched the spammed comment.



Figure shows comment forum with matching comment on FCC’s page (http://gizmodo.com/can-john-oliver-s-pro...1795095982)
What happened was far well too timed to be just a incident.

[insidious]

More info i've been looking into

The site was then was quickly flooded with comment against net-neutrality. Almost all comments were identical in nature implying this was done spur of the moment (http://bgr.com/2017/05/11/fcc-net-neutrality-comments/). The content of the comment was the following.

Code:

“The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation. I urge the Federal Communications Commission to end the bureaucratic regulatory overreach of the internet known as Title II and restore the bipartisan light-touch regulatory consensus that enabled the internet to flourish for more than 20 years. The plan currently under consideration at the FCC to repeal Obama's Title II power grab is a positive step forward and will help to promote a truly free and open internet for everyone.” Spammed Comment found on FCC’s website against net neutrality  

Sources point to a lobbying group known as CFIF (Center for Individual Freedom) a conservative group, who was a strong financer and owner of www.stopnetregulation.org back in 2010 when Obama passes net neutrality as law(http://gizmodo.com/can-john-oliver-s-pro...1795095982). There is also suggestion that a lobbying group broadband for America also could be involved.
Gizmodo sent an email about the spam botting and received a reply claiming no responsibility. However, when looking at the CFIF’s letter to the FCC page it’s comment section matched the spammed comment.



Figure shows comment forum with matching comment on FCC’s page (http://gizmodo.com/can-john-oliver-s-pro...1795095982)
What happened was far well too timed to be just a incident.

I agree that there is a large probability this may be an act by an external source/astroturfing. I think there is someone on reddit analyzing the comment data and attempting to separate bot from human. I think they are using a combination of "if this user has the same first name/variation of last name" as well as how much a comment differ from each other in order to decide if it's a bot. I can imagine it's a difficult process, considering much of the comments from John Olivers show (by real people) are what Oliver recommended, and so the same.

It will be interesting to view the results if the analysis is done correctly (which may definitely be a tedious process)

[DarkMuse]

Oh man. I almost created a thread outlining what's going down but I'll break it down here minimally.

FCC Chairman, I'm just gunna call him Mr.CoolTeenGuy, is trying to repeal the Obama administration's ruling on Net Neutrality which essentially told ISPs to fuck off with the bullshit throttling to selected websites possible if the Net Neutrality didn't exist. Basically prevented ISPs from ever slowing your connection to any one website. Mr.CoolHipGuy thinks we can repeal this stuff because the government can curb these companies from doing such a thing.

Look at the history of the government trying to regulate things. Big Companies can essentially bribe the gov't to their favor via lobbying which is a big fucking concern. If this bullshit goes through, we're gunna get fucked by the oligopoly that is ISPs. Nobody wants that.

So at this point it would make sense that special interest groups would want to persuade the FCC into abolishing net neutrality but the manner in which this happened seems to be way too obvious. You'd think the special interests would've done something like this much more discretely.

My guess? Some l33t skid(s) who wanted to get their opinion across but were too fucking stupid to do so in a meaningful way such as organizing a group of real people to submit their opinions in the democratic manner that America is fucking based off of decided to do all this fuckery. Congrats on demonstrating how stupid you are.

/rant

[DigitalJinx]

It's unlikely because most skids 1.) would lack the ability to do so, 2.) would lack the motive as only people would benefit would be ISP companies. I would put it more on a poor last ditch attempt to compete with the number of real comments.

[edit: forgot to include details]

[Blink]

ANTI net neutrality?

This is complete bullshit.

[insidious]

ANTI net neutrality?

This is complete bullshit.

Yeah still absolutely leaning towards AstroTurfing

But the news has been pretty quite about it lately. I really hope they don't get away with it that easily