In 2017, when the Federal Communications Commission Chair Ajit Pai, a Donald Trump appointee, announced plans for the FCC to trash Obama-era net neutrality rules, he opened the FCC website up to public comments on the plan. As it turned out, and as has long been suspected, millions of the comments that were posted on the topic were fake, as AVN.com reported, creating the phony impression that rolling back the open internet protections had overwhelming public support.
The “comment period,” required for most newly proposed regulations, is the American public’s only chance to have a direct say in federal regulatory decision-making.
But the sources of those fake comments, many of them originating from the email accounts of real people—and often from the accounts of real dead people—has remained unclear. Late last year, Pai admitted that about 500,000 of the nearly 10 million fake comments originated in Russia, as AVN.com reported. But that still left millions unaccounted for.
Until now. An extensive investigative report published last week by BuzzFeed news revealed that about 1.5 million of those bogus comments—many of them using stolen identities, including the identities of two sitting United States Senators—originated from a single political consultant, who is also an activist with the right-wing “sting” operation Project Veritas.
That consultant, Shane Cory—founder of the consultancy firm Media Bridge—was working for a major political lobbying organization, Broadband For America, that claims to be a coalition of “consumer” groups but according to the technology news site TechDirt is in reality, “little more than a cut-out for Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and other industry giants.” That is, the very telecommunications companies who would potentially benefit from the repeal of net neutrality rules.
But according to BuzzFeed, there was an intermediary between Cory and Broadband For America: Ralph Reed, a longtime conservative Christian activist who has also been one of Trump’s most prominent supporters on the evangelical right. In fact, Reed titled an upcoming book, Render to God and Trump, though the publisher later changed the title to For God and Country: The Christian case for Trump, according to Politico.
Cory also outsourced the collection of email accounts that could be used for the fake comments to another firm, LCX Digital. That company is run by digital advertising man and accused fraudster John Hilinski, who according to BuzzFeed has made a number of fabricated claims—including that he co-founded the once-popular search engine AltaVista, and that he has played in the alt-rock band Jane’s Addiction.
“In a sworn deposition, a cofounder of LCX described the business as a 'completely fraudulent' enterprise that had routinely faked data in its corporate work,” BuzzFeed wrote.
BuzzFeed did not receive comments from Hilinski or anyone representing Broadband For America. Reed flatly denied that he or his company were involved in using fake or stolen identities to post net neutrality comments.
Photo By Slowking4 / Wikimedia Commons
