In 2017, @fightfortheftr and others exposed a large anti-net neutrality astroturfing campaign targeting rulemakers and the FCC, and flooding the FCC’s public consultation with fake comments. Yesterday, the NYAG published its investigative findings:

https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/oag-fakecommentsreport.pdf

The NYAG found that broadband lobbies funded a covert campaign to manufacture public support for the repeal of net neutrality rules & to provide “cover” for an unpopular decision.

Fake online comments, shady online lead gen firms and stolen identities were its core components.

The report shows the lobbying firm paid $4.2M for 8.5 million fake comments and half a million letters emailed to Congress, which doesn’t sound like great value given that meanwhile, a 19 y/o kid on his own filed over 7.7 million pro net-neutrality comments.

The kid did better, too: he made up fictitious identities instead of stealing real people’s. A few folks had indeed already spotted that their names, their kids’ names, and even names of loved ones who had passed away were being used to submit fake comments to the FCC.

In laying out the harms of this fraudulent astroturfing, NYAG insists both on the corruption of the democratic process and on the impersonation harms.

The report includes statements of affected citizens whose identity (or that of loved ones) have been used in the campaign.

NYAG notes that these types of fraudulent impersonation tactics were widespread throughout the campaign, which was conducted primarily by three entities and through “a convoluted supply chain of co-registration companies:”

When running short of real people’s identities to use for the campaign, one of the groups even resorted to using personal data lifted from a data breach (!) to file in comments on behalf of people whose privacy had already been violated once… ()

Obfuscation efforts happened at multiple levels, with the entities using fake advocacy groups to hide the origins of the comments, and the lead generation firms lying to their own clients about the fraudulent tactics used to “recruit” the commenters.

Comments couldn’t all read the same and they didn’t have GPT2/GPT3 handy back then ( #readfakes!), so one of the ad firms involved in the campaign used a simple piece of software to vary the fake submissions:

Instead of engaging w/ the many red flags reported to BFA/the lobbying firm, the campaign’s funders commissioned their own report on how this online activity demonstrated strong grassroots support for their position and even briefed the report to the FCC (extra troll points here)

The report leaves a few questions open for investigators, noting that a batch of fake 1.6 million comments also came from an unknown source, but more importantly noting that the entities involved in manufacturing the astroturfing campaign were also involved in other campaigns.

The entity responsible for the largest share of the fake comments (a lead gen firm called “Fluent”) used similar tactics for a wide array of political campaigns it was involved with:

If you’ve been snoozing on disinformation news, this is yet another instance of corporations using deceptive tactics to influence political conversations online.

It’s nothing new (this is a case from 2017!), and these types of campaigns can absolutely be domestic & well-funded.

Interestingly, the report doesn’t mention a social media component in these campaigns, so we don’t know (yet!) if these campaigns also used fake accounts and other deceptive tactics on top of the fake comments to target the FCC and lawmakers on social media.

There’s more to do to ensure this doesn’t keep happening. The NYAG report has a few suggestions (both on the policy and technical side), and @fightfortheftr released a letter that notably asks for additional investigations into… the rest of the iceberg:
https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2021-05-06-fight-for-the-future-group-who-originally-exposed/