Exactly. Millions of real people took time out of their lives to register complaints with the FCC through an intentionally obtuse and user-antagonistic system. How often do millions of Americans get so upset about something this abstract that they’ll actually do something? Not very damned often, but every time net-neutrality killing legislation came up, that’s exactly what happened time and again.
This time all of the real objections were suddenly and unexpectedly accompanied by a bunch of obviously fake comments in support of it, lots of which were found to be made using the names and addresses of recently deceased people, and many people reported seeing comments from themselves when they didn’t make any such comments.
It was so blatantly obvious. One might think that it was a bumbling attempt, but I don’t think that’s probably true. They hold/held enough cards that it doesn’t matter that it was obvious fraud, and that means that one could argue that is what they were actually after. It showed people very plainly that it simply didn’t matter that they fulfilled their democratic obligations and they participated in the system. They got up and got involved, many for the first time, only to watch this gleeful sycophant pick up their efforts and dump them in the trash. When those people said, “wait one minute, we saw what you did, what the hell?” the FCC and the current administration simply shrugged and said, “so? We had to throw it out! It was tainted by fraud! Naturally, that means that we will be going forward with the stated plan.”
This was probably an intentional strategy to disenfranchise people. Narrowing in on the key demo more specifically, I’m willing to bet it was meant to dishearten and demoralize people for whom their energy against Trump was their first real experience with political action and being justifiably outraged about a “boring” policy decision. I can very easily see some betentacled eldritch advisor suggesting, “so we’ll let them complain and build up enough momentum that they think they’ve won, then we poison the data by inserting obviously fake comments supportive to our legislation. When the snowflakes notice and take issue, we’ll lean on Papa Tangarine’s bellicose persona to rebuff them and discredit the entire process, claim that it’s impossible to know what is real and what is not, and move forward with our plan to help our friends in the telecommunication industry in unimpeded. This should be all it takes to disenfranchise the newly-active members of the political opposition, and greatly reduce their willingness to context to policy decisions in the future.”
Or so I reckon.
