On Monday, I posted about the importance of net neutrality, and of making your voice heard as the Trump FCC considers rolling back the existing strong enforcement policy.

Fortunately, that’s hardly a minority view, as more than a half million people have weighed in on the FCC’s public comment system to that end. (To reiterate, you should, too: go to gofccyourself.com, click “Express”, then leave a comment supporting “strong oversight of net neutrality based on Title II enforcement.”)

However, about ten percent of the comments have weighed in against net neutrality. And while that might elsewhere be a sign of healthy debate, it’s a bit suspicious that 58,000 of those comments use the exact same clip from a 2010 anti-neutrality press release, with posts cycling in perfect alphabetical order by posters’ names.

According to some crack reporting by ZDnet today, the supposed posters of those comments confirmed that they hadn’t left the comments themselves. Some didn’t even know what net neutrality was.

In other words, this looks like a textbook ‘astroturfing’ bot attack. Given the outsize role of bots during the 2016 election, I hope more media outlets will follow ZDnet’s lead, and give this issue the coverage it deserves. It’s bad enough that powerful internet service provider lobbies egged the FCC into considering scaling back enforcement in the first place; it’s even worse if those same players are resorting to underhanded tactics to try and make it seem like it’s what we, the people, want.