Next time you see the usual DK evening spam in English, try this little exercise after you post that Rockcrusher image:
Do a simple text search with a sample and you’ll see some patterns that sometimes match up with some frequency analysis files, often hosted in odd places on the InterWebz.
You’ll not get a perfect match of all words but rather something that first-year college students have become quite adept at, namely the paraphrasing of copied online text that might not be their own writing. Similarly, bot algorithms are being used to corrupt public comment.
The following analysis, among many made of the dubious comment dataset is one of the better ones:
Key Findings:²
- One pro-repeal spam campaign used mail-merge to disguise 1.3 million comments as unique grassroots submissions.
- There were likely multiple other campaigns aimed at injecting what may total several million pro-repeal comments into the system.
- It’s highly likely that more than 99% of the truly unique comments³ were in favor of keeping net neutrality.
After clustering comment categories and removing duplicates, I found that less than 800,000 of the 22M+ comments submitted to the FCC (3-4%) could be considered truly unique.
But just because the largest block of pro-repeal submissions turned out to be a premediated and orchestrated spam campaign¹³, it doesn’t necessarily follow that there are many more pro-repeal spambots to be verified, right?
As it turns out, the next two highest comments on the list (“In 2015, Chairman Tom Wheeler’s …” and “The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed …”) have already been picked out from previous reporting as possible astroturf as well.
www.google.com/…
If anything, this actually supports the need for greater transparency much dissimilar to the “trust us” promises of those who would benefit from ending Net Neutrality.
And stonewalling the investigation hasn’t endeared the FCC to anyone.
More interesting is the now commonplace use of relatively small teams of troll-farms not necessarily doing work for governments or the military but for commercial interests.
Financial investor operations wishing to cash in on the balkanization of the Internet would profit from the the manorial segmentation of increased profit with the end of net neutrality. The chaos created by Trumpery also emboldens more daring disruption of network operations.