Net neutrality comments mostly came from bots and fake email addresses, Pew finds

Mike Snider | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption The winners and losers of eliminating Net Neutrality The Obama-era regulation might come to an end.

Among the nearly 22 million public comments about net neutrality filed with the Federal Communications Commission in recent months, only 6% of them were unique comments, a Pew Research Center study has found.

Automated comment filing and bot programs played a huge part in the process -- bots delivered a slew of comments on both sides of the issue -- with tens of thousands of comments filed simultaneously at the same second several times.

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The FCC gathered public comments for more than four months (April 27-August 30, 2017) on the agency's plan to overturn the 2015 Open Internet order, or net neutrality rules, supported by President Obama and the Democrat-led FCC. The rules prohibited Internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking or giving preference to broadband content.

Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican who voted against those rules and was named chairman by President Trump, in April began a fact-finding process that could lead to those rules being reversed. The new rules, which the FCC plans to vote on Dec. 14, requires ISPs to disclose any blocking or prioritization of their own content or from their partners.

More: The FCC wants to end net neutrality. What that means for you

Supporters on both sides of the issue — the pro-net neutrality backers and the opponents to the 2015 rules — utilized automated methods to submit comments, the collective influx of which far surpasses any previous FCC public comment-gathering process.

The vast majority of the comments filed, 94% of them, had similar wording and were submitted up to hundreds of thousands of times, Pew found.

For example, the single most-repeated submission Pew found was a pro-net-neutrality comment that appeared as a submission form on the website battleforthenet.com, a site run by the net neutrality advocacy groups Fight for the Future, Demand Progress and Free Press —and was promoted on air by HBO's Last Week Tonight host John Oliver.

The wording for three of the top nine most-popular submissions were against the current rules and appeared on the Taxpayers Protection Alliance website.

The seven most-submitted comments — six of which argued for an overturning of the current rules — made up more than one-third (38%) of all submissions, Pew says.

This doesn't delegitimize the public comments, Pew says. "Nor is there anything inherently wrong or sinister about bulk filing of comments," the researchers say in the report. "This analysis simply highlights the scale at which digital tools are being brought to bear in the long-standing practice of commenting on proposed government rules."

More than half of the comments (57%) used duplicate, temporary or disposable email addresses, Pew says, and many names appeared thousands of times, while many names were not real.

"In many cases patterns in the comments indicate those submitting the comments intentionally entered false or misleading personal information," the Pew researchers said.

Overall, only 6% of all comments were unique.

More than 100 times, 25,000 or more comments were filed at the same second, Pew says. The biggest comment drop occurred on July 19 when 475,482 comments were submitted at 2:57:15 p.m. eastern time, Pew says. Nearly all of those comments supported the current rules and used variations of wording that had appeared on the site battleforthenet.com. For example, the same comment was submitted 286 times by someone named "Andrew.”

Supporters on both sides of the issue have raised concerns about the public comments and bogus submissions. And a ZDNet investigation in May found that a bot was being used to post comments using names of people who, when contacted, said they had never submitted a comment.

Several Democratic senators asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate multiple distributed denial of service attacks (DDoSs) the FCC suffered during the comment period. Six months ago, New York state attorney general Eric Schneiderman says he began an investigation into the possible misuse of people's identities but the FCC has declined to cooperate with him, the official said in a column on Medium.

Chairman Pai told a Senate committee during his confirmation hearing in July the agency will "make a full and fair review of the record,” regarding the comments.

Pew did not take a stance on any wrongdoing in the incident. Instead, it aimed to highlight "the relative ease with which online commenting systems allow groups and individuals to mount large-scale campaigns for public policies." said Pew Research Center associate director for research Aaron Smith in a statement accompanying the report. "Such efforts were difficult to orchestrate in the pre-internet era and even three years ago were not taking place at the scale it has this time.”

More: FCC Chairman takes on net neutrality critics including Cher and Hulk

More: After net neutrality: How to tell if your ISP is slowing your Internet

Follow USA TODAY reporter Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider.