Last week, John Oliver warned that Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai was taking aim at net neutrality, and encouraged his viewers to write the FCC to register their opinion on the proposal. It worked, apparently. "The FCC site did get a ton of comments — the number is up to around 1.6 million, and those comments have come from all quarters of the political spectrum," Oliver said in a Last Week Tonight update Sunday night.
Not everyone was celebrating the burst of wonky civic engagement. The FCC complained about hacktivism aimed at the public-comment section, and some conservative commentators, like Liz Harrington at the Washington Free Beacon, discounted all the comments because some of the commenters used obviously fake names. "She is right, some of the comments on the site were faked — but interestingly, many of those were on the other side of this issue," Oliver said, including 128,000 identical comments against net neutrality that appear to be from spam bots.
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