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Comment by swapsmagic | Hacker News Reader

It's so easy to identify those fake comments by just looking at few. I figure this is one of the comments that seems fake. Why is it taking long to identify there are lot of fake comments in it?

'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.'

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You’re right that it can be easy to spot comments that may be fake, but to have confidence that certain comments are fake requires further analysis. One reason is that the mere use of identical text in multiple comments (even large numbers of comments) isn’t necessarily evidence of misconduct – many public interest groups use web forms with pre-prepared comment text that people can fill out, or they circulate petitions for people to sign to provide consent to having the same “form letter” comment submitted on their behalf. So we look to other attributes that are shared across certain comments to help us determine if they’re likely fake. While we’ve already gathered enough evidence to conclude that a million comments are likely fake, we’re still analyzing others. And of course, it would be much easier and quicker to identify which comments are likely fake if we could analyze FCC records showing the source(s) of comments (which we would keep confidential given the possible identifying information), but the FCC refused to respond to our repeated requests over many months.

I would say that this comment is "real" - in the sense that it was actually wordsmithed for the position it supports, but that it is likely that the purported person's name and address are fake/misattributed to the comment.

This wordsmithed position likely came from some partisan political action web site gathering automated signatories; you go to it, fill out your info, and it posts to the FCC input form/api or whatever.

Similar ones exist as well for the opposite view ("for net-neutrality rules").

At that point, it's a matter of generating the information and pasting and sending (the actual text is usually pre-filled on the form, sometimes with allowances to allow a real user to edit the form).

For instance, I looked up my name on the AG's site - it found several hits. Most of them were "against net neutrality" - essentially with the text you posted - but the addresses didn't match my address.

But a couple were posted "for the current net neutrality rules" urging the FCC not to change anything; even so, I didn't post them, and the addresses didn't match.

Curiously, one of those two comments had a small sentence tacked onto the end, reading "Don't fuck this up!" - which is something I would never put into a public comment to a govt agency or request. So even though I agreed with the position, it still appalled me to see that vulgarity applied to the comment.

All comments though were fake - I never sent any of them in to the FCC.

> All comments though were fake - I never sent any of them in to the FCC.

Or your name isn't that uncommon. Have you ever tried being the first google result for your name, as an SEO experiment? It is hard!

I say this as someone who shares a name with a minor league baseball player, numerous facebook/linkedin/etc profiles and a baby whose life/death was covered by the BBC.

I don't go around accusing all of these people of being fake.

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