It would make the ip address information useless. What they probably want to do is figure out how many comments came from the same network blocks that were allo

It would make the ip address information useless. What they probably want to do is figure out how many comments came from the same network blocks that were allocated to organizations (to detect large numbers of fake comments). If you hash the ip addresses you can't figure out which ones came from the same network allocation, the most you could do is figure out which comments came from identical ip addresses.