The Federal Communications Commissions' public comment period on its plans to repeal net neutrality protections was bombarded with bots, memes, and input from people who don't actually exist. The situation's gotten so bad that FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, as well as several members of Congress, including one Republican, have called for the FCC to postpone its December 14 net neutrality vote so that an investigation can take place.

The FCC seems unlikely to comply. According to an FCC spokesman, the FCC is zeroing in on legal arguments within those comments, effectively disregarding any outpouring of support for net neutrality from regular Joes. "The purpose of a rulemaking proceeding is to not to see who can dump the most form letters into a docket. Rather, it is to gather facts and legal arguments so that the Commission can reach a well-supported decision," Brian Hart, the FCC's head of media relations, tells WIRED. Now, the Commission is barreling ahead toward Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to essentially allow internet service providers to speed up or slow down internet traffic however they please.

So, with the FCC declining to investigate its own comments, we decided to undertake an analysis of our own.

Yes, researchers have already sliced and diced the data. But parsing 23 million comments can quickly bend toward abstraction. How many of those commenters are real? How many are bots? How many were real, but using identical form letters drafted by advocacy groups?

For a better handle on just how broken the FCC comment system is, we went granular, analyzing all of the submissions that fell under a single name. We wanted a name that was common enough to produce a decent number of hits (so, you know, not Issie Lapowsky), but singular enough that we could actually mine them in a few days (tough luck, James Smith). We settled on Nicholas Thompson, WIRED's editor in chief, and excluded any Nicks, or Nicholas Thompsons who also supplied a middle initial.

That left us with 39 results between May 11 and December 8 of this year. Using a combination of Facebook, public records tools like Spokeo and Nexis, and the good old fashioned telephone, we attempted to make contact with each of them. It's far from a perfect or scientific sample, but it does help illuminate what the chaos in the FCC's comments look like up close. Here's what we found:

The Bots

Let's start with the outright fakes, since they're in some ways the easiest to sniff out. To find the bot Nicholas Thompsons in our sample, we enlisted the help of FiscalNote, a company that processes public comments on behalf of corporations to help them make sense of the policy landscape. Researchers at FiscalNote previously identified nearly one million comments as bot submissions, all of them opposing net neutrality. Each one followed the same paragraph pattern, stringing together 35 synonymous words and phrases in a particular order to form similar, but not identical, comments.

FiscalNote's vice president of research Vlad Eidelman found six comments that fit that pattern among the 39 Nicholas Thompsons, all submitted over the course of eight days in May. They included strange grammatical formations, like in the example below: