It's appalling, though the Techcrunch piece doesn't provide the annoying detail that the 19yr-old who submitted 7.7M fakes did it in support of Net Neutrality[1] - with friends like this...
> The broadband industry funded the fraudulent creation of about 8.5 million of those, while a 19-year-old college student submitted 7.7 million, and the remainder came from unknown but spurious sources.
The article doesn’t explicitly say that the comments funded by the broadband industry were in favour of rolling back net neutrality, so I had to guess on that one too.
Thinking about it some more makes me question these assumptions. It seems plausible that putting forward straw-man arguments to be robustly demolished could be a useful tactic to those interested in manipulation.
1: https://apnews.com/article/government-and-politics-technolog...