More than 22 million comments were filed at the FCC website with the majority in favour of scrapping the pro-net neutrality rules approved during the Obama years.

According to a new analysis by Gravwell, a data analytics company, it would appear that of the 22 million comments submitted to the FCC website only 3,863,929 comments were "unique" and the rest were copy-pasted comments, from bots who seemed against net neutrality.

The Gravwell founder, Corey Thuen,  told Motherboard: “Using our  simple classification, over 95 percent of the organic comments are in favour of Title II regulation."

One comment was sent to the FCC 1.2 million times and was packed full of mistakes when the line was converted into text by the bots.

"The quotation characters are the Windows smart quotes, meaning that someone generated the bulk uploads using a Microsoft package (like Word or Excel)", he said.

Another one was sent 1,096,617 times in August alone. That means a grand total of 10 percent of all comments about net neutrality the FCC received were these two comments posted over and over.

Gizmodo had a look at the headers and found that the first comment was sent from the Centre for Individual Freedom, a conservative advocacy group. The CFIF claimed that the comment was filed by people using a form on the organisation's website.

Some pro-net neutrality people also used bots. But according to their analysis, Thuen and his team couldn't find that many, and they were easier to spot.

"Those bots that were in favour of regulation were often very obvious in their behaviour", Thuen said. "They submitted comments with text like I am in favour of strong net neutrality. Sincerely, James Jones' 848 times. They simply substituted their names, like Patricia Johnson, James Davis, etc. The developers of anti-regulation bots appear more sophisticated" presumably because they had more money behind them.