Don't Be Fooled Or Distracted By Trollish Comments To The FCC

from the that's-not-the-story dept

Tue, Jun 24th 2014 12:16pm — Mike Masnick

This is hardly a surprise, but with John Oliver exhorting "internet commenters" to go comment on the FCC's net neutrality proposal, potentially flooding the FCC's servers, many of the comments are fairly childish and unproductive. And while reporters love to pick up on those kinds of comments as a highlight of how silly this process has become, enabling them to shake their head or wag their finger about "oh that silly internet," that's misleading in the extreme. It's the same sort of thing as traditional journalists totally dismissing the idea of internet comments on news stories, because there will always be some idiot who posts something stupid.

Yes, stupid, pointless and juvenile comments will happen. That's part of the internet. But to focus only on those comments is to ignore two much more important things: (1) the sheer number of folks expressing concern about the big broadband companies messing up the internet and (2) the very large number of thoughtful, intelligent and insightful comments that have been submitted as well. As of right now, the FCC shows somewhere around 125,000 comments, but that hasn't been updated in a while, and we've heard that they may have double that (or more) waiting to be posted. And, yes, when you have ~300,000 comments on a contentious issue, some of them are going to be silly, but that outpouring of opinion suggests that this is a topic that the public is very interested in, even if not everyone is able to express their thoughts in the most professional of ways.

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Filed Under: comments, fcc, net neutrality, open internet, trolls

10 Comments

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Michael, 24 Jun 2014 @ 12:19pm

People don't post "stupid, pointless and juvenile" comments you asshat.

Can't you ever get your reporting right?
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- Daniel, 24 Jun 2014 @ 12:38pm
  
  Response to: Michael on Jun 24th, 2014 @ 12:19pm
  Good one Michael. Succiently snarky.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jun 2014 @ 12:41pm

It's not like the internet has a monopoly on stupid, pointless, and juvenile comments. Basically any TV or radio show that accepts calls from viewers or listeners is subject to calls from people ready to go on a rant, or people just calling to screw with them. They just have much greater incentive to screen such feedback.
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- Baron von Robber, 24 Jun 2014 @ 12:43pm
  
  Re:
  Otherwise known as AM radio. =b
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- Another Anonymous Coward, 24 Jun 2014 @ 12:49pm
  
  Re:
  You could add any forum that allows people to speak and rant as they wish, just look at Congress; pointless, stupid and juvenile to the extreme.
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- Anonymous Coward, 24 Jun 2014 @ 12:59pm
  
  Re:
  Many of them don't rely on input from the general public for crazy, they just rely on their staff and guest politicians.
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- Anonymous Coward, 25 Jun 2014 @ 2:42am
  
  Re:
  See the letters to the editor sections of newspapers and how incredibly stupid they can get.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jun 2014 @ 1:35pm

Or it could be an inside job to make the opposition look like jerks and idiots.
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Anonymous Coward, 24 Jun 2014 @ 6:38pm

Episode of Cheers
I just pretend that they are filming another episode of Cheers.

Example: "Frasier, do you really tell your patients that?"

Drivilous comments are an art form in itself.
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fgoodwin (profile), 25 Jun 2014 @ 1:27pm

Quality vs. Quantity
The problem with the flood of inane and pointless comments is that it makes it damn near impossible to find the useful, fact-based comments.

Everyone has a First Amendment right to express their opinion, but what the FCC actually needs is factual responses to the questions it asks in its NPRM. Truth be told, none of the people screaming at the FCC have even bothered to read the NPRM. OTOH, corporations like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast will respond with facts, and address the FCC's questions.

The result will be, predictably, that the FCC will rely on the facts presented by the AT&T's of the world, while ignoring the fact-free opinions and mindless rants of all the spammers. By making the FCC's job more difficult, the spammers are actually pushing the FCC into the arms of the big ISPs.

Is that the result people really want?
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