Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
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. Instead, 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…