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Morning Brief · October 28th 2026
Bots wrote three-quarters of the replies to a UK government consultation
Automated submissions made up 90,835 of the 118,756 responses to a 2023 UK consultation on banning disposable vapes, according to research in Tobacco Control reported by the Guardian. Nearly all of them opposed the ban. Officials detected and excluded them.
The detection worked this time. A public consultation counts responses, and generated text makes responses cheap, so any agency that weighs volume of opinion is now exposed. SourcesB
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This story ran in the Morning Brief of October 28th 2026.