You’re right that it can be easy to spot comments that may be fake, but to have confidence that certain comments are fake requires further analysis. One reason is that the mere use of identical text in multiple comments (even large numbers of comments) isn’t necessarily evidence of misconduct – many public interest groups use web forms with pre-prepared comment text that people can fill out, or they circulate petitions for people to sign to provide consent to having the same “form letter” comment submitted on their behalf. So we look to other attributes that are shared across certain comments to help us determine if they’re likely fake. While we’ve already gathered enough evidence to conclude that a million comments are likely fake, we’re still analyzing others. And of course, it would be much easier and quicker to identify which comments are likely fake if we could analyze FCC records showing the source(s) of comments (which we would keep confidential given the possible identifying information), but the FCC refused to respond to our repeated requests over many months.