The "mail-merge" the article refers to is also known as "spinning". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning
More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked
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Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the majority, including many of the most damaging ones, were signed.
>The majority...many Notice I never said all or even most of the emails were altered. That some of them may have been subtly altered was one point of my argument.
If an email that wasn't part of the public debate was altered, who cares? The simple fact is that, of all the emails that were covered by the media, the Clinton campaign was unable to point to a single one and say it was altered.
Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Clinton campaign refused to ever point to a specific email that was altered, making the claim that they were quite unbelievable.
Let's assume that there is an email that looks bad for the campaign. The email was slightly altered to make it look a bit worse. Do they admit to writing the slightly less awful email, prolonging the coverage and erasing all doubt that they wrote it?
YES! Obviously! Because if the campaign could show that a single email was altered, it casts doubt on the entire set. Many people would immediately jump to the conclusion that many emails were altered and disregard the story entirely.
Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get money out of politics. No more superPACs. No more third party bullshit. My proposal: only contributions from individuals to official campaign organizations. Each person can donate a total of $100, split any way they want. I’m tired of so many decisions being made at the behest of some campaign funder whispering in a politician’s ear. Our democracy is being corroded by all this money.
Your solution has a clear result: only the wealthiest would be able to run for office.
Yeah. It either would change nothing, or make it worse.
Not to mention the first-amendment implications of all-out banning political donations from firms. When people can't assemble their money together, their right to assembly is being violated. If you control when and where people can donate their money, you're violating freedom of expression.
That was the main argument behind the boogeyman Citizen's United decision.
Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked
#85There was also a lot of direct copypaste spam on the pro-NN side https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*Sc4-R2waeRrGnNL90...
The clincher, though, is that the significant majority of the natural language, individually written comments supported Net Neutrality.
Yes, there are vested interests prepared to commit fraud on both sides. But all of the people feel the same way about this.
I suppose the question therefore is, if the politicians are prepared to upset all of the people, they must be pretty confident they'll still be re-elected next time around?
Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked
#86Every social media website is dominated by people supporting net neutrality. I don't even remember seeing an opposing opinion, except from Trump's government. Maybe I'm living in some weird bubble, but it seems to me the argument is really not an argument, but an artificially created nonsense.
Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
@learc83 'Innocuous party planning emails morphed into Pizza Gate, which was spread in large part by Russian trolls.' Don't want to hijack an important discussion of deliberate misrepresentation of net neutrality citizen perspectives, but I think you will find there was a massive emergency cover up over 'pizzagate'. The sudden use of the term 'fake news' everywhere in the corporate media coincided with the pizzagate…
Pizzagate is a crackpot conspiracy theory. A rather bad crackpot conspiracy theory. No one takes it seriously. Even Alex Jones has retracted his Pizzagate statements. The term fake news started being used because people were spreading fake news based on completely absurd readings of leaked emails. The "evidence" for Pizzagate is absolutely comical.
A lot of people take Pizzagate quite seriously, because there is more than enough evidence to start a serious, professional investigation. The fact that intelligent people write it off immediately is more about how well the propaganda campaign against this investigation has worked - and yes, there was definitely a coordinated effort to make Pizzagate 'nonsense' in the public eye.
Ask yourself this question: what if there really is evidence of a network of pedophiles who have infiltrated government in order to compromise it? Would you feel it better to cover it up, quietly, or would you rather have mass anger at the government?
Because, the UK decided it was a national security risk, and they covered up their particularly nefarious corruption by these networks. The US has pretty much done the same thing, albeit with a particularly American flair, wherein the brand "pizzagate is fake news" was very well established as a counter-effort, in order that less people take a look - for themselves - at the evidence being uncovered by citizen investigators.
I've gone deep down the rabbit hole of Pizzagate, looking at everything I could on the subject, and I'm no idiot. I believe there was a serious attempt to cover up the corruption - by a pedophile mafia - of the US government. I also think that it behooves every citizen of an open, democratic society, to demand that the secret powers these governments grant themselves be tested - so even if Pizzagate is entirely fake and nothing more than a fantasy concocted by autistic "Russians" (even that is fake news), it behooves the citizenry to not be thwarted, so easily, by the "fake news" brand being propagated by the powers that be.
One should not be so quick to dismiss the pizzagate controversy. There really is bad stuff like this happening, and it is of such a heinous nature that there would be riots in the streets. If you haven't seen this, you're not making an honest effort to discover it, because the evidence is there. Please, do not be so dismissive - this is a heinous scenario. Our governments have failed us in this situation, and it is up to we, the citizens, to deal with the aftermath.
Ritual sexual abuse is a thing in our governments. It is heinous and vile, and that is why we are being kept from the truth.
Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
@learc83 'Innocuous party planning emails morphed into Pizza Gate, which was spread in large part by Russian trolls.' Don't want to hijack an important discussion of deliberate misrepresentation of net neutrality citizen perspectives, but I think you will find there was a massive emergency cover up over 'pizzagate'. The sudden use of the term 'fake news' everywhere in the corporate media coincided with the pizzagate…
Pizzagate is a crackpot conspiracy theory. A rather bad crackpot conspiracy theory. No one takes it seriously. Even Alex Jones has retracted his Pizzagate statements. The term fake news started being used because people were spreading fake news based on completely absurd readings of leaked emails. The "evidence" for Pizzagate is absolutely comical.
https://steemit.com/pizzagate/@djdmc/this-video-details-a-co...
Have you actually looked at any of the evidence?
Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
[I am not a lawyer] Only Congress passes laws (statutes). The FCC is a regulatory body. It has statutory authority (delegated by Congress) to create regulations, not statutes (laws). Proposed FCC regulations have to go through a process defined by statute. Publication and comment are part of that process. Irregularities in the process may form the basis of judicial challenge. Whether what is described here constitute…
> Regulations may have the force of a law, but don't receive the same level of judicial deference in terms of intent. Yes, statutory laws must be proven unconstitutional to be struck down, and regulatory laws can be more easily affected by judicial decisions. But for the last 30 years, regulations have been accorded an inappropriate degree of deference by the courts: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspir…
If "anti net-neutrality" regulations shall be considered unconstitutional, so shall "pro net-neutrality" ones.
[edit: instead of downvoting me, tell me why left-leaning regulations are automatically Good (and constitutional), and why right-leaning are automatically Evil (and unconstitutional) ?]
Re: More Than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments Were Likely Faked
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Just like the election This seems far worse than what happened with the election. The hacked emails at issue in the election were real, and they revealed bad things that the Clinton campaign was involved in. I have always found it laughable that the complaint seems to be “we lost because the Russians uncovered the bad things I was doing, and it’s not fair that people found out about them”. If the emails had all been…
I'd love to see Trump's emails. But, very curiously, wikileaks didn't release anything negative about Trump. Only seeing one side's dirty laundry is the problem. Don't kid yourself that only one side had it.
Trump is a newcomer to political power.
Clinton is not.
The goals of Wikileaks - to deconstruct the military-industrial power elite as represented by Clinton - are more aligned against Clinton than they are against Trump. There is no doubt that Trump may become a member of the power elite eventually, and thus continue the scenario that Wikileaks was designed to defeat - but the 30-year old veteran of power politics simply represents a bigger and more dangerous liability to our freedoms and to the notion of democracy. This can be seen in the countless examples of her cabals' attempt to thwart the democratic process, time and again, during her campaign as well as during her time as an entrenched politician.
Just because there isn't "Damage to the other side" doesn't mean that the target of Wikileaks isn't just as important. Perhaps you've missed the part where Wikileaks intended purpose is to deconstruct the secret power structures that usurp our democratic freedoms - Trump hasn't done a lot of that yet. Clinton has done metric truckloads of it, already, for decades now.