There's a lot more of us. And we're all real people.
This would be kind of pathetic, if it weren't so funny. So there's this "conservative anti-net neutrality movement, but
pretty much only on paper, generated by conservative strategist Phil Kerpen. A week after the "Internet Slowdown" protest, in which tens of thousands of international websites participated, Kerpen emailed his followers: "We were up against over 40,000 websites in a deceptive, manipulative effort to scare their readers into supporting Internet regulation … BUT WE WON!" Here's winning:
Kerpen's grassroots coalition of 808,363 petition signers came almost entirely through paid email advertisements sent out through popular conservative websites such as Town Hall, The Washington Times, Human Events, and Red State. Email blasts were sent to hundreds of thousands of people with subject lines that had nothing to do with net neutrality, such as "Only Days to Stop Obama's Takeover." […]
Kerpen played on the far right's fear of government and dislike of Obama to get hundreds of thousands of people to sign a series of petitions that have no information about the issue at hand and has no links to places to learn more about the issue. A Senatorial press office told me it hasn't received the petitions, which Kerpen said he had "hand delivered" before admitting that they could have been misplaced.
This is even better: the most influential
tweet, according to Thunderclap. It—"a website that allows people to pledge their Twitter accounts to amplify a single tweet"—only got one retweet. That's some influence!
But here's the part that's really great. These conservative groups have accused the FCC of helping net neutrality activists file their comments. That's because, knowing that they would be absolutely deluged with comments in the days leading up to the September 15 comment deadline, the FCC talked to the groups activating huge numbers of comments to try to get them to stagger their submissions so the agency's decrepit website wouldn't break.
"The FCC IT team worked with multiple parties to ensure everyone was able to successfully submit comments to the agency on the open Internet proceeding," [Kim Hart, an FCC spokeswoman] said.
Get that? They worked with these groups to make sure that
everyone could submit their comments, even that overwhelming
one percent of people who are opposed to net neutrality. If the system crashed,
no one would have gotten their comments in. But they're still victims! Even though the FCC and net neutrality activists worked to make sure that their voices would be heard, too. On second thought, that is pretty pathetic.
Sign and send the petition: Demand FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler hold public hearings on net neutrality.
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