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Harrington Explains John Oliver's Supposed Grassroots Campaign Against the FCC

The Washington Free Beacon's Elizabeth Harrington appeared Wednesday on Fox Business to explain how television host John Oliver's campaign against the Federal Communications Commission is not the grassroots movement it appears to be.

Host Neil Cavuto played a clip of Oliver telling his audience how to contact the FCC before Harrington explained that it was not as honest as it appeared.

"So John Oliver is calling this a grassroots campaign. He is asking, he has about four million viewers, to flood the FCC website with comments," Harrington explained. "It's not really surprising that you have a lot of vulgar, obscene, and downright racist comments when John Oliver himself is calling this campaign 'Go FCC Yourself,' so it's not that surprising you get a lot of nasty comments."

"But a broader point here is they're calling this grassroots, it's really not anything of the kind," Harrington continued.

Harrington explained that many of the comments coming through Oliver's system to contact the FCC are using fake names, while the website "Go FCC Yourself" is registered with a Canadian company that has aided "comment campaigns" in the past.

"Last year you had a copyright regulation regarding the internet, and there were 85,000 identical comments all that were registered using the same website from this Canadian company," Harrington said.

Harrington said the root of the issue is that the government holds too many regulations over internet providers, while the current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai wants a free market base for service providers.

Published under: FCC , Free Beacon , Internet