The Double-Edged Sword of Public Comments

This week on The Vergecast, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks with Jeremy Singer-Vine, the data editor for the BuzzFeed News investigative unit, about his story that was published recently regarding the fake comments on the Federal Communications Commission’s online net neutrality debate.

If you haven’t read the piece, you should. The investigation details where all of the fake comments in the FCC’s net neutrality process came from, including dead people leaving comments and shady political operatives involved in the scam.

It’s not really a story about net neutrality; rather, it’s about how systems designed for public participation in the government are so easily scammed, and what the challenges are for preventing such scams from happening.

Nilay and Jeremy discuss why it happened, how it happened, and what happens next if we want to use the internet to encourage open access participation in government without corruption.

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