Bots, fake comments, and E-rulemaking: the impact on federal regulations

E-rulemaking, adopted over a decade ago, allows federal agencies to use technology to provide electronic submission of public comment for a rule through the Federal Register. Some scholars suggested that this could create a space for deliberative democracy and improved regulatory outcomes. Yet, has e-rulemaking achieved its goals? The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Net Neutrality Rule received millions of fake public comments submitted by “bots,” many from outside the U.S. The central focus of this exploratory project is to use the e-rulemaking literature as a descriptive baseline to examine original interview data from 32 agency rule-writers and program managers from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA, from 2002–2019, served as the managing partner of e-rulemaking initiatives. Our focus is to determine what, if anything, the agency did to identify bots or to screen out fake comments. The findings suggest the 2002 E-Government Act did not anticipate the emergence of bots and thus fails to provide agencies with sufficient guidance on how to identify and treat bots and fake comments.