LOS ANGELES—During the run-up to its vote on repeal of net neutrality rules in 2017, the Federal Communications Commission, as required, opened the issue to public comments on its website. The site was flooded with more than 20 million comments from the public, a record, many supporting the repeal.
There was only one problem. At least 2 million of those comments were fake.
Ever since, the FCC has resisted demands to hand over the internet metadata on those fake comments — data that would help reveal where the phony comments originated, and from whom. In May, a federal judge ordered the FCC to hand that data over to journalists at The New York Times.
The FCC quickly appealed, refusing to turn over the data. But this week, the commission dropped that appeal, and must now hand over the metadata files to the Times, according to a report by Digital News Daily.
Many came from fake accounts, sometimes stealing the identities of actual people, both living and deceased — including two United States senators who later demanded that the FCC explain how their names turned up on bogus net neutrality comments.
But at least 500,000 of the fake comments — as FCC Chair Ajit Pai eventually admitted — originated in Russia. Another 1.5 million originated with a single political consultant who was a lobbyist for the broadband industry — an industry which largely favored net neutrality repeal.
But the New York Times has said that it intends to dig deeper, examining data that would reveal user IP addresses, time stamps, and headers that could allow the comments to be traced back to specific individuals. When the FCC refused to hand over that data, the venerable newspaper filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.
In resisting the court’s ruling in May, the FCC said that turning over the data would violate the privacy of users. But the commission did not comment on why it changed its collective mind and dropped the appeal.
“If genuine public comment is drowned out by a fraudulent facsimile, then the notice-and-comment process has failed,” Souther District of New York Judge Lorna Schofield wrote in her May ruling. “Disclosing the requested data in this case informs the public understanding of the operations and activities of government in two ways -- at the micro level with regard to the integrity of the FCC’s repeal of the particular net neutrality rules at issue, and at the macro level with regard to the vulnerability of agency rulemaking in general.”
Schofield was appointed to the bench on 2012 by President Barack Obama.
A spokesperson for The Times told Digital News Daily that the news organization was “pleased” by the FCC’s decision.
“We believe the data will assist our reporters in their continuing investigation into how the public comment process at the FCC was corrupted by bad actors,” the Times spokesperson said.
Photo By Ajay Suresh / Wikimedia Commons
